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Re: Could we start accepting rich-text postings on the gcc lists?
> It's not that they *cannot* follow an arbitrary rule. It is that the
> rule bears no relation with the quality of their work, so they see it
> as an artificial roadblock which merely irritates them. Add enough
> irritants and they may decide to take their contributions elsewhere.
Coding standards are "arbitrary" rules. For the vast majority of coding
standards, you can't make a technical argument for or against them. We all
agree to use the same standard because we understand that uniformity is
important.
Similarly for text-only vs. "rich text". You may argue that there's no
compatibility issue, but I disagree. As was pointed out upthread, when
people use "rich text", they often start to use colors or other mechanisms
to express themselves, which can now be dependent on the rendering agent
used to read the email. Requiring people to express themselves using only
words seems to me to encourage the sorts of discipline that we require in
contributors.