Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

caniemail.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 263 posts

Re: Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

#171

Post by prmoustache »

makapuf wrote: post #131
lelanthran wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

A subset of markdown (since you can use html in markdown) might be a good candidate.

I would have favored gemtext to avoid the temptation of re-adding html support to a dumbed down markdown flavor.

Re: Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

#172

Post by prmoustache »

arp242 wrote: post #97
zzzkkk wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this intended as sarcasm? Markdown renders to html, it's an authoring syntax that happens to be readable in it's "code" state. How would it solve email? The real issue is bespoke rendering engines instead of just using a rule of "everything the current browser can do, but no js".

Markdown gives most people >95% of the formatting they want to do. It's easy and fairly intuitive to write (most of it, anyway). It's easy to read in different formats and ways (HTML, plain text). It doesn't add highly complex rendering issues. I've worked on two email clients in the last ten years, and the amount of weird HTML some send is just bonkers. Is in emails crazy? Yes. Do you need to deal with it? Also yes.

The point is: markdown is HTML, not something else.

Re: Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

#173

Post by prmoustache »

pavo-etc wrote: post #75
zzzkkk wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this intended as sarcasm? Markdown renders to html, it's an authoring syntax that happens to be readable in it's "code" state. How would it solve email? The real issue is bespoke rendering engines instead of just using a rule of "everything the current browser can do, but no js".

If emails could be marked up with the subset of HTML that Markdown is able to generate without having inlined HTML tags, email markup would be so pleasant. Just bold/italics, some headings, tables, properly flowing text, code blocks, horizontal rule, links, and images.

you just need gemtext. Bold/Italics can be done with unicode, no need for a markup language.

Images can just be links and it would be a setting on the client to open it or not. Like what the Lagrange gemini browser does: it lets you click on a link to an image to load it.

I would argue that even tables are superfluous, you could put a csv file in a block quote and people's clients could just render it optionnally.

Re: Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

#175

Post by chrisldgk »

ryanbigg wrote: post #66

What an excellent resource! (And yes Outlook is a pain and supports so very little!) We've tried building email templates for notifications for our apps where I work, and it has typically been a pain. We have since swapped to using mjml ( https://mjml.io/ ) to build the templates, and it's working wonders. The output seems the be the most compatible with all different devices that we've tested on. The other tool we e…

While we‘re here I‘d also like to recommend react-email[1] which I‘ve been using for building emails for a while now. The components it offers are more than enough and it‘s definitely better than building mails with tags every five lines like we did back in my email marketing days.

[1] https://react.email

Re: Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

#177

Post by dustedcodes »

I can't figure out how to use it.

When I enter "Test" rel="nofollow">https://example.org>Test" it says "No results found. Why not suggest this feature to be added?".

When I enter "" I get "AMP for email", "BIMI", "accent-color" and lots of other CSS attributes starting with "a" as result.

When I enter "a" I get the same as above.

How do I check if I can email the HTML Anchor tag? The input says "HTML, CSS, ..." but it doesn't seem to understand HTML unless I'm doing it wrong?

Re: Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

#178

Post by bregma »

Semaphor wrote: post #88
throw0101c wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But at this point, it's pretty clear that most non-technical people prefer emails with fancy text and graphics. And what percentage of e-mails from people / human beings have those things? Certainly marketing e-mails have fancy formats, but I've rarely seen any person at a companies I've worked at use any kind of formatting: generally most folks hit reply and start typing with whatever the default is. Hardly any it…

If plain text would support inline-images, I’d probably be okay with it. But it doesn’t, so I’m not. I also generally prefer structured formatting to plain text.

They say an image is worth 1000 words.

If you're sending emails with thousands of words you have probably chosen the wrong medium.

Re: Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

#179

Post by nedt »

dustedcodes wrote: post #177

I can't figure out how to use it. When I enter " Test " rel="nofollow">https://example.org>Test " it says "No results found. Why not suggest this feature to be added?". When I enter " " I get "AMP for email", "BIMI", "accent-color" and lots of other CSS attributes starting with "a" as result. When I enter "a" I get the same as above. How do I check if I can email the HTML Anchor tag? The input says "HTML, CSS, ..." b…

You might have been unlucky searching for the a element that's really short. And very basic HTML would work everywhere. But you might be more happy to go via the feature list: https://www.caniemail.com/features/

Re: Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

#180

Post by arp242 »

prmoustache wrote: post #172
arp242 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Markdown gives most people >95% of the formatting they want to do. It's easy and fairly intuitive to write (most of it, anyway). It's easy to read in different formats and ways (HTML, plain text). It doesn't add highly complex rendering issues. I've worked on two email clients in the last ten years, and the amount of weird HTML some send is just bonkers. Is in emails crazy? Yes. Do you need to deal with it? Also yes.

The point is: markdown is HTML, not something else.

It's not. Markdown is markdown. It can render to HTML, but that's a different thing. I struggle to understand why this is even a point of contention.
Post reply on HN