ASCII Ribbon Campaign

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The ASCII ribbon campaign is an Internet phenomenon started in 1998 advocating that e-mail be sent only in plain text, because of claimed inefficiencies and dangers of the HTML system when used with email.

()  ascii ribbon campaign - against HTML e-mail 
/\  www.asciiribbon.org   - against proprietary attachments

                       _
ASCII ribbon campaign ( )
 against HTML e-mail   X
                      / \

/"\
\ /  ASCII Ribbon Campaign
 X    against HTML e-mail
/ \

[edit] History

Following the development of Microsoft 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 17th June 1998 by Mauricio Teixeira of Brazil[1].