41–50 of 263 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who works very regularly in email, it really bugs me that every time I see a thread about this topic in Hacker News there seems to be this confirmation bias that this is how the average person uses email in the wild, and I’m just trying to make the point that “Hey, this is a strong minority viewpoint.” I get that y’all don’t like HTML email, but the fact of the matter is, that was a battle lost 25 years ag…
[flagged]
IMO, HTML was the worst thing that ever happened to email. Plain text content is the best content.
But at this point, it's pretty clear that most non-technical people prefer emails with fancy text and graphics.
Personally, I'm just glad that email is a flexible enough medium to allow that. It's better than the alternative, where people moved to some closed, proprietary protocol behind like 20 patents that allows the same thing.
Is there any other common way we communicate over screens (aside from http) that has had the staying power of email for the general public? I think that's a testament to the sheer flexibility of it. The ugliness that people have contorted email into is a badge of honor IMO
Can I Email? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27112960 - May 2021 (273 comments)
Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20948826 - Sept 2019 (196 comments)
'Can I Use' for Email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20934601 - Sept 2019 (1 comment)
I was using this for a feature I was working on last week. That’s when I learned gmail doesn’t support SVG???? That seems like a huge miss.
SVG supports JavaScript.
From what I'm reading, it seems that from inside an SVG script, you can call out to javascript functions of the parent page? That seems kinda surprising, I'm sure there are security policies around it, but it means that there are potential security and performance risks/considerations around hosting and serving SVG files that I didn't realize existed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. I wish I had more people that fit that filter. Email is broken and just a platform for spam. Even if it might be from someone that I purchased something from once or even regularly, if I did not select a check box to opt-in to receiving your email, it is spam. It's 2024. Emailing large file attachments is about as old and busted as FTP. There are so many other services to "share" large files. Attachment t…
As someone who works very regularly in email, it really bugs me that every time I see a thread about this topic in Hacker News there seems to be this confirmation bias that this is how the average person uses email in the wild, and I’m just trying to make the point that “Hey, this is a strong minority viewpoint.” I get that y’all don’t like HTML email, but the fact of the matter is, that was a battle lost 25 years ag…
https://lutrasecurity.com/en/articles/kobold-letters/
And if we have to chose between bold letters or less malware, we should choose the latter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's reminiscent of IE, being the most popular and underfeatured.
Most popular only because it was included with the OS and most IT departments did not allow use of other browsers. Just because it was the most installed does not make it the most popular. There was an old saying, "Internet Explorer: the most used browser to download another browser."
It was only after triple whammy of Netscape being unable to further compete, the dotcom crash and the antitrust suit against Microsoft's integration between Windows and IE that IE got deprioritized by MS and slowly turned into the underfeatured mess every developer hated.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who works very regularly in email, it really bugs me that every time I see a thread about this topic in Hacker News there seems to be this confirmation bias that this is how the average person uses email in the wild, and I’m just trying to make the point that “Hey, this is a strong minority viewpoint.” I get that y’all don’t like HTML email, but the fact of the matter is, that was a battle lost 25 years ag…
[flagged]
Caniuse exists too, does that mean HTML and CSS are broken? Nah, it's just a useful resource to help people decide what tradeoffs to make.
I think the whole mess could have been averted if Markdown had been invented about twenty years earlier.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who works very regularly in email, it really bugs me that every time I see a thread about this topic in Hacker News there seems to be this confirmation bias that this is how the average person uses email in the wild, and I’m just trying to make the point that “Hey, this is a strong minority viewpoint.” I get that y’all don’t like HTML email, but the fact of the matter is, that was a battle lost 25 years ag…
There are valid reasons ro dislike HTML in emails https://lutrasecurity.com/en/articles/kobold-letters/ And if we have to chose between bold letters or less malware, we should choose the latter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
[flagged]
Personally, I don't have any need for HTML email in my daily life, and the only emails I occasionally get that are very obviously 'broken' in some way in plaintext mode are usually marketing emails or other messages I don't want to read in the first place.
So, I figure, may as well keep it disabled since plaintext is more consistent and easier to read, and there is significantly less surface area for exploits when you don't need to bundle half a browser to view a couple of paragraphs.