On Mon, 3 Jul 2006, Dave Burt wrote:

> In my experience, the web browser is a far more consistent platform, and
> perhaps more ubiquitous, too.

nothing is ubiquitous like text and grep.  all my mail is on disk - because it
is i can use grep to search all of the archives.  no mail agent compares to
this.  having the code as text means the plethora of text tools available to
me also work on that code - it's really hard to compare to this.

> The fact that there are crappy mail clients (some even in common use) seems
> to me to swing in favour of moving to the web. You can participate on this
> list on the web; I'd recommend that over such a weak mail agent.

it's not that they're crappy - it's that they are often remote.  i use pine or
mutt becuase i am logged in remotely 99.9% of the time to 10-50 machines at
once.  graphical mail browsers are totally out of the question to use over
ssh, especially since i manage accounts for 4 different users and would need a
window open for each.  currently i keep all 4 open in a screen (the screen
program in case you are un-aware) and can attach to this screen to monitor my
mail from anywhere in the world on any platform using nothing but a terminal
and ssh.  you can imagaine that 'popping open' a url when i'm logged in via
putty tunneling through a few linux boxes is slightly less than convenient.

> I think I've knocked down that point, so let me add another of my own: if
> you put the code in the mail, it gets archived with the rest of the list's
> messages, and it does belong there. (You can download all submitted
> solutions at rubyquiz.com, but that's a bit out of the way from the list.)

and this is __so__ important.  the mailing list is a dynamic information
network with tools aplenty to navigate and search through it - but pulling
information out we require new tools to be written in order to acheive this.

that said - the odd url is fine with me, i simply prefer inlining.

kind regards.

-a
-- 
suffering increases your inner strength.  also, the wishing for suffering
makes the suffering disappear.
- h.h. the 14th dali lama