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by emasirik 1376 days ago
It's a bit rude for HN, but from the bottom of the article,

> "But if plaintext is so good, why is this page written in HTML?"

> This is a reference document, not an email, you twit.

2 comments

It seems their main point is using HTML is trading accessibility and security concerns for prettification. Why is a reference document an acceptable trade off of accessibility and security concerns for prettier formatting but a personal email isn't?

They could have made this site plain text and followed all of their own guidelines, but they didn't. Instead, they wanted to make the site look prettier to get their message across with additional formatting plain text can't handle. They're reducing accessibility and increasing security issues just for their own superfluous desires.

Well, this reference document seems to work reasonably as plain text. What’s that person’s excuse for html just because it moves via HTTP?

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5322.txt

Plain text with 80-column line breaks suuuuucks on mobile. Give me HTML any day of the week.