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page last modified on 2002-12-23 01:02 CET
© 1996-2014 by patric sperling

ASCII Ribbon Campaign
against HTML mail, vCards and proprietary formats

online since 2000

»this trend, on the web at least, has resulted a glut of graphics heavy, worthless pages,
that take a million years to download and once you have them, you wish you hadn't wasted the time.«
gabriel helman - the semi-official, semi-serious ascii ribbon campaign against gratuitous graphics on the web!

idea - well i'm not that strict and completely anti-graphic (to be seen on this page, for instance) as gabriel helman, but anyway i think that a lot of pages have too much graphics on them. i feel still able to protect myself from these pages by simply not browsing them. BUT! it's pretty hard to prevent yourself from receiving such formatted email. the only things they are good for is to raise my online costs, to delay their own displaying and to bloat my mail folders.

signatures - if you agree, feel free to join the movement and show this by adding it to your signature. anyway, if you like to alter the proposed signatures, feel free to do that, again.

• chisseled version (4 lines)

  /"\
  \ /    ASCII Ribbon Campaign
   X   against HTML email & vCards
  / \

• smooth version (4 lines)

                         _
  ASCII ribbon campaign ( )
   - against HTML email  X
               & vCards / \

• corpulent version (7 lines)
  sent in by retnek

    _
   /o\
  // \\ The ASCII
  \\ // Ribbon Campaign
   \V/  Against HTML
   /A\  eMail!
  // \\

• brief version (2 lines)
  sent in by sergio gutiérrez santos

  ()  ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail 
  /\                        - against microsoft attachments

• monstrous version (10 lines)
  sent in by scott l.

      ~^~
    //   "\\   /\\
    \\    //  //\\\ -------------------
      @  //  ///=\\SCII Ribbon Campaign
        X   /=---=\\gainst HTML E- Mail
       X   ///     \\
     // \\ ----------------------------
  \ //   \\
  \//     \\
           \\

undo - as a matter of stupidity (or something else - who knows), some big email programs seem to be shipped with html set to be the default mailing method. however, this (mostly) is no dogma! you can easily turn off that annoying feature. harley hahn sent in this tutorial for outlook and netscape. others may follow soon.

origin - to put this straight: i did not invent the ascii ribbon campaign, but i highly support it. i searches the web quite long, but as i did not find any pages offering signatures along with reasons and the special focus on emails, i decided to create this page.

godfather - i received a mail from dario dariol, who tried to help tracking down the origin of the signature. currently it seems to go back to mr. teixeira from brazil, but as he has changed his email address since then, we were not able to completely reveal the mystery. for the time being let's accept this as the first appearance of the ribbon:

Date: Wed, 17 Jun 1998 10:20:01 +0300 (GMT-3)
From: Mauricio Teixeira <mauricio@amazonline.com.br>
To: redhat <redhat-list@redhat.com>
Subject: Re: Space problem?
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.96.980617101931.25216A-100000@server.amazonline.com.br>
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On Wed, 17 Jun 1998, wward wrote:

> the filesystem still shows no space available. Where is the space
> I freed-up?

Sometimes the space freed-up os shown only after a reboot... I
dunno why...

__________________________________________________________________
Mauricio Teixeira - Amazonline Internet Provider - Belem/PA/Brazil
mauricio@amazonline.com.br - badman@brasnet.org
http://www.mauricioteixeira.eti.br (soon!)
/"\
\ /  CAMPANHA DA FITA ASCII - CONTRA MAIL HTML
 X   ASCII RIBBON CAMPAIGN - AGAINST HTML MAIL
/ \

brothers - fortunately this page is no longer alone in the world wide web:

• the semi-official, semi-serious ascii ribbon campaign against gratuitous graphics on the web! (english, 1998)
• 7 reasons why html e-mail is evil (english, 2000/2002)
• no html mail (english, 2003?)
• losderover.be (dutch, 2003)
• ascii ribbon campaign (german, 2004)
• ascii ribbon campaign (english, basically a mirror of my page)