ASCII Ribbon Campaign
Encyclopedia
The ASCII ribbon campaign was an Internet phenomenon started in 1998 advocating that e-mail
be sent only in plain text
, because of inefficiencies or dangers of using HTML e-mail
. Proponents placed ASCII art
in their signature block
s, meant to look like an awareness ribbon
, along with a message or link to an advocacy site:
Windows 95
, certain people became annoyed that they were receiving email in HTML and other non-human-readable formats. Sally Hambridge of the Intel Corporation wrote in the RFC 1855 entitled "Netiquette Guidelines" dated October 1995: "Do not include control characters or non-ASCII attachments in email messages". The first known appearance of a ribbon in support of the campaign was in the signature of an email dated 17 June 1998 by Mauricio Teixeira of Brazil.
E-mail
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
be sent only in plain text
Plain text
In computing, plain text is the contents of an ordinary sequential file readable as textual material without much processing, usually opposed to formatted text....
, because of inefficiencies or dangers of using HTML e-mail
HTML e-mail
HTML email is the use of a subset of HTML to provide formatting and semantic markup capabilities in email that are not available with plain text.Most graphical email clients support HTML email, and many default to it...
. Proponents placed ASCII art
ASCII art
ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters...
in their signature block
Signature block
A signature block is a block of text automatically appended at the bottom of an e-mail message, Usenet article, or forum post. This has the effect of "signing off" the message and in a reply message of indicating that no more response follows...
s, meant to look like an awareness ribbon
Awareness ribbon
Awareness ribbons, due to their ubiquitous nature, have come to symbolize various concerns depending on the colours or the patterns used. For example, black ribbons may be used for mourning....
, along with a message or link to an advocacy site:
|
History
Following the development of MicrosoftMicrosoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
Windows 95
Windows 95
Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented graphical user interface-based operating system. It was released on August 24, 1995 by Microsoft, and was a significant progression from the company's previous Windows products...
, certain people became annoyed that they were receiving email in HTML and other non-human-readable formats. Sally Hambridge of the Intel Corporation wrote in the RFC 1855 entitled "Netiquette Guidelines" dated October 1995: "Do not include control characters or non-ASCII attachments in email messages". The first known appearance of a ribbon in support of the campaign was in the signature of an email dated 17 June 1998 by Mauricio Teixeira of Brazil.