People who love information for information's sake, and who view extraneous decoration as not only unnecessary, but as a detriment to the free, easy, flexible flow of data.

People who are interested in communicating, not showing off or frittering.

People who think the phrase "lowest common denominator" is a compliment, not an apology.

People who take The Unix philosophy, and its tenet of everything's a text file, very much to heart.

People who think it's ineffably bogus (not because it's a waste of bandwidth or anything, but because it's so breathtakingly, stupefyingly, pointlessly unnecessary) to receive a piece of e-mail containing


Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="supercalafragalisticexpialidocious"

This message is in MIME format. Since your mail reader does not understand
this format, some or all of this message may not be legible.

--supercalafragalisticexpialidocious
Content-Type: text/plain

Hey, Steve!  Whatcha doing tomorrow?

--supercalafragalisticexpialidocious
Content-Type: text/html

<html>
<body>
<p>
Hey, Steve!&nbsp; Whatcha doing tomorrow?
</p>
</body>
</html>
--supercalafragalisticexpialidocious--
Is it really necessary to encode this sort of thing as HTML, let alone HTML and plain text?

[None of this is to say that all HTML is bad. When you need markup, HTML is fine. But you don't always need markup. It's the notion that plain text is boringly obsolete, or that HTML or other markup should be used everywhere, that I'm disagreeing with.]

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