question about formatting

[Mark A. Mandel]

I read ADS-L in digest format, by choice. My office email system is Lotus
Notes connected to the Net through a firewall; I have no control over
those. Stephen Boatti's post "re: Japlish" dated "Fri, 9 Mar 2001 11:05:00
-0500"  came to me in MIME encoding, with an HTML doppelganger very heavily
loaded with formatting code of a type unfamiliar to me (who am no expert in
these things). The whole item amounted to over 11kB. A short extract
follows, deliberately somewhat mangled* to, hopefully, force
MIME/HTML/XML-friendly mailreaders to present it pretty much as I saw it.

I wrote to Stephen off-list about it, and he replied:

>>>
This is a mystery to me. I just use Microsoft Outlook. No one else on the
list complained.
<<<

Am I the only person who saw it this way, the only one who minds, the only
one who wrote to Stephen about it, or what?

   Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company
          Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Senior Linguist
 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com

* Mangled by changing HTML and MIME control characters: angle brackets to
curly braces, ampersands to octothorpes ("pound signs", "number signs",
"crosshatches"), etc.

>>>>>>>>>> BEGIN QUOTATION>>>>>>>>>>>>
{meta name~3DProgId content~3DWord.Document}
{meta name~3DGenerator content~3D"Microsoft Word 9"}
{meta name~3DOriginator content~3D"Microsoft Word 9"}
{link rel~3DFile-List href~3D"cid:filelist.xml at 01C0A888.AC344820"}
{link rel~3DEdit-Time-Data href~3D"cid:editdata.mso at 01C0A888.AC344820"}
{!--[if !mso]}
{style}
v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);}
o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);}
w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);}
.shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);}
{/style}
{![endif]--}{!--[if gte mso 9]}{xml}
 {o:OfficeDocumentSettings}
  {o:DoNotRelyOnCSS/}
 {/o:OfficeDocumentSettings}
{/xml}{![endif]--}{!--[if gte mso 9]}{xml}
 {w:WordDocument}
  {w:Zoom}0{/w:Zoom}
  {w:DocumentKind}DocumentEmail{/w:DocumentKind}
  {w:EnvelopeVis/}
  {w:Compatibility}
   {w:ForgetLastTabAlignment/}
   {w:DoNotUseHTMLParagraphAutoSpacing/}
  {/w:Compatibility}
 {/w:WordDocument}
{/xml}{![endif]--}
{style}
{!--
 /* Font Definitions */
@font-face
<<<<<<<<< END QUOTATION <<<<<<<<<