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. . . I imagine the "march of progress" cartoon will look something
like this:
0) Plain ascii text.
1) Text with a few fancy characters, encoded as utf-8 and/or as
html character-entities.
2) Unrestricted HTML (with formatting directives, not just
individual character entities).
3) Attachments.
Level (2) is open to abuse: For example, somebody might choose
to post messages using very large characters (ten inches high
or larger) ... perhaps because they look better on his screen,
or perhaps just to make a point. I don't want to read such
things. Also there's lots of potential nastiness associated
with cookies, javascript, included images, et cetera.
Level (3) is quite beyond the pale for the forseeable future.
It carries infinite risk of abuse, including viruses, worms,
and other wildlife.
For that matter, it is an open question as to whether we are
ready for level (1) ... hence the recent test messages.
In *any* case, one way to deal with things that can't be
represented in plain text is to put them on the web in some
standard, portable format (such as html, png, or pdf) and
put a link in a message to the list. This is far from
perfect, but better than nothing, i.e. better than being
rigorously restricted to plain text only.