141–150 of 263 posts
A fully-featured HTML "document" is really an application, not a document at all, so it makes sense that mail clients limit support. But this fragmentation makes me yearn for a real standard here, an official non-application subset of HTML that doesn't allow fetching remote resources or executing code. Just a document format with embedded media, animations, styling, etc.
IMO, HTML was the worst thing that ever happened to email. Plain text content is the best content.
> IMO, HTML was the worst thing that ever happened to email. Plain text content is the best content. Your first statement might be true (it's debatable). Your second is definitely false. Lets assume that HTML really was the worst thing that ever happened to email. Plain text content for email is still not the best content. People want to: 1. Click on a link in the email, not fumble with copy and paste on their phone.…
The most contagious/problematic issue is (3) and inlining - as I said, it's possible to attach anything but the location is lost. Probably something simple like anchor (again, markdown linking comes to mind) to indicate placement would be just fine...
(I loath html mails with passion…)
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Regarding 1. it's up to the client to parse and highlight links in plain text.
> Regarding 1. it's up to the client to parse and highlight links in plain text. If the client is interpreting the content and then displaying its interpretation to the user, then it's not plain text anymore, is it? It's a format; in this case it's a poorly-specified, ad-hoc format and broken format[1] that is worse than simply having a reduced ad-hoc HTML format. Just like HTML is "plain text" which is interpreted b…
Oh interesting, I pasted a URL in plain text and a bit of code in HN turned it into a link you can click on. I think it's totally fine for email clients to do that too.
The only thing I find redeeming about HTML email is the ability to have inline images so when I'm illustrating some sort of process to somebody I can do it more clearly. Without those, I'd create and send a proper document (I don't object to attachments), or publish the information on a wiki/blog/etc - but perhaps a those would be overall better approaches than a 'rich' email.
IMO, HTML was the worst thing that ever happened to email. Plain text content is the best content.
> Plain text content is the best content. Hard disagree. Things like bolding text, adding pictures, changing colors, etc are very important for the emails I send. So some amount of HTML is important to me.
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Hence, it's a totally valid assomption that the HN crowd might be aware of it. I'm sorry you were not, but you really are an outlier on this, which is really not a bad thing, btw.
A fully-featured HTML "document" is really an application, not a document at all, so it makes sense that mail clients limit support. But this fragmentation makes me yearn for a real standard here, an official non-application subset of HTML that doesn't allow fetching remote resources or executing code. Just a document format with embedded media, animations, styling, etc.
Is it a “document” if it has animations and non static (video) media?
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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…
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That is not the point though.
The point is that the vast majority of people prefer transactional / marketing emails in rich formatting. They understand them better, they prefer interacting with them, it results in a better overall user experience.
Who creates all those transactional / marketing emails in HTML? Developers. Plenty of them.
All of them are in a difficult situation because writing HTML for sucks. It REALLY sucks. Tools like this one help them (the developers!).
Not using HTML emails is not an option in this field. It will never be as long as the average user (AKA the average customer) responds well to rich formatted emails.
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First: I run a popular newsletter that uses custom HTML theming and CMS customization. I don’t work in marketing. I just genuinely think HTML in email is actually a value add. Not everyone you disagree with works in marketing. Secondly: The problem you’re pointing at is bad implementation of standards, which is entirely on Microsoft and Google. (Mostly Microsoft.) The reason HTML doesn’t work well in email is because…
Honestly the main reason is that HTML/CSS expanded well over the creation of documents into the creation of apps. Email content does not really need all of that, it will always only support a subset of that causing confusion.
That said, the lack of standards is definitely the worst aspect of all of this and resulted in the current absolute chaos
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That was a saying later in the game and among techies. Website usage stats indicate that in 2007 a solid 67% of people were using IE, and that didn't drop below a majority of usage until mid-2010. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
I remember hearing stats about the continued high numbers for IE, but a lot of those numbers were attributed to pirated copies of XP being used in China. Maybe it was why IE6 seemed to hang around as high as it was. Just a clarification of the numbers that I found interesting.
https://www.techinasia.com/chrome-firefox-chinese-online-ban...