Re: HTML in emails

At 10:09 PM -0400 7/6/10, Paul M Foster wrote:

On Tue, Jul 06, 2010 at 06:32:40PM +0200, Per Jessen wrote:

In principle, I agree - in practice, CPU cycles are getting cheaper by the minute, and being wasted all the time. Not using HTML is highly unlikely to have a measurable impact on anybodys CPU cycles.

I keep hearing this argument. Here are what I consider similar arguments. "Everyone else pours their waste into the river. Ours won't make that much difference." "Our smokestack is just one of hundreds in the city. No one will notice the additional smoke." "Putting paint thinner down the toilet won't make any difference. The water processing plant will clean it up." Just because everyone else wastes CPU doesn't mean you have to contribute to it, too.

I keep hearing this argument too! There's always two sides to every argument -- to extend your metaphor, as a result of pollution we have the EPA and other environmental concerns who are now so focused on the "rules" they actually hurt the quality of life for *all* things (the recent Gulf Oil Spill is one of thousands of examples). The application of any rule-set should be tempered with how it affects the whole and not the just a part. The term "Waste" in the phrase "Wasting CPU cycles" is dependant upon what yardstick you use to measure what "waste" means. I do not think it a waste when you break your code into more manageable parts as compared to creating a cryptic routine that simply runs quicker. When creating code, there are things more important things to consider than CPU cycles, such as readability, maintainability, and reusability. Every programmer has to realize that "Wasting CPU cycles" (like wasting memory) is becoming exponentially less of a problem whereas creating reusable code is doing just the opposite. So when considering "waste" I hold programmer's time in more regard than CPU cycles. Just because some people write cryptic code, doesn't mean you have too. :-) Cheers, tedd -- ------- http://sperling.com http://ancientstones.com http://earthstones.com