[thelist] Email Newsletters and Stylesheets

[Bob Meetin]

Sarah Adams wrote:
>> What I am seeing is that the newsletter WYSIWYG program which works with
>> a simple approach is overwhelmed and seems to lose track of how to undo,
>> where undo begins/ends.  When I switch to code view I see "apple"
>> specific font stuff, strings of <i> or <br> which the editor does not
>> even use.  This makes me think it is coming from copy/paste.
>>     
>
> My clients are under *strict* instructions never *ever* to paste
> anything into a WYSIWYG editor from Word, HTML, etc. Only *ever* from
> plain text. You get cruft like this in the background that does untold
> things to your presentation, and worse, it tends to multiply in the
> background each time the content is saved. I've seen it get so bad that
> the WYSIWYG editor couldn't handle the crufty HTML anymore and either
> wouldn't load at all or crashed the browser completely. Not pretty.
>
> (Now if only my clients actually *followed* said instructions, I'd spend
> a lot less time trying to decruftify HTML, and my life would be a lot
> simpler.)
>   
Can I multiple "DITTO?"  Is that legal?  Unfortunately I have found that 
some people simply don't understand the concept of plain text and don't 
know how to navigate their PC and pull up a plain text editor.  Not 
being a Mac user and rarely booting up my Windows PC, this ca be a 
hair-raising experience and task trying to explain how.

So I adopted a "control" approach.  I set up a really simple web-based 
form with a textarea and no WYSIWYG enabled.  They can use it, save it, 
then copy/paste when set.

However you can still sense a level of frustration in the background.  
Why can't I (do it my way)?