[thelist] Email Composition Question

[David Wagner]

Burhan Khalid wrote:

>    I have noticed that even with HTML turned off, on some emails, Moz
> will print certain things in bold (and display smilies, which is a nice
> touch). I was wondering, what command/tag cause it to display in bold,
> what should be text with no formatting? I'd love to use it, since on my
> system's font, it really stands out well.

<long-winded history lesson>

Someone doing Mozilla development decided to play god with a few of the
ASCII text communication conventions that have been around for a few
centuries now. (Okay, okay, they're only Internet centuries. And yes,
you can berate me for talking about "Internet time".)

Back in the stone age of bulletin board systems, when unformatted ASCII
was all there was, people developed conventions to mark up their written
communication, usually to indicate emphasis or emotion. It turned into a
complex science, and later began to include emoticons and such, taking
electronic written communications to an expressive level that approached
(and, some say, surpassed) that of speaking on a telephone.

Now Mozilla has taken some of these conceptual elements (which are along
the lines of <strong> tags in HTML: a "use your imagination"
implementation) and turned them into actual formatting commands (similar
to <b> tags in comparison).

It's kinda fun, in some ways, but I worry that another historical
standard is being co-opted by The Man, even if it is only Mozilla. :)

</long-winded history lesson>

To answer your original question:

The only ones I've discovered so far are *asterisks* and _underscores_.

_Underscores,_by_the_way,_can_be_used_in_place_of_spaces_to_indicate_an_extended_underline.

*Two asterisks can enclose an entire phrase.*

--

David Wagner
dave at worlddomination.net