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Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

caniemail.com

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Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#21

Post by canofbars »

lozenge wrote: post #5

Isn't it time for desktop clients to embed a real rendering engine? The isolation on them has reached a good level.

Thunderbird had the best rendering engine of them all last time I checked with the microsoft ones being worse. Even if they did embed a real rendering engine you still have to deal with all those people using office 2010

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#22

Post by svat »

I'm just now trying to send some mathematics in an email (where most recipients will be reading it in Gmail), so I'm having to figure out what subset of HTML and CSS Gmail supports. (Found this reference for CSS: https://developers.google.com/gmail/design/reference/support...) It turns out that simply using MathJax or KaTeX and pasting the resulting web page into an email doesn't work: Gmail doesn't support SVG images (security concerns?), so one needs to convert images to PNG, but then converting every $n$ or $x$ into a separate image feels like overkill (the email would become huge and slow to load), so it would be nice to only convert expressions that “really” need it. It seems Pandoc by default has a mode where it converts only “simple” expressions and throws a warning on math that cannot be converted to simple HTML (using "em" and "sup" tags and a Unicode alphabet for things like ∑), so we can use this as a trick to identify which math expressions need conversion to images. Then if any of these images occurs inline, we need to figure out the baseline problem.

And so on... Funny how trying to do the slightest thing with technology (send some mathematics over email) immediately turns into a research project.

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#23

Post by orf »

svat wrote: post #22

I'm just now trying to send some mathematics in an email (where most recipients will be reading it in Gmail), so I'm having to figure out what subset of HTML and CSS Gmail supports. (Found this reference for CSS: https://developers.google.com/gmail/design/reference/support... ) It turns out that simply using MathJax or KaTeX and pasting the resulting web page into an email doesn't work: Gmail doesn't support SVG imag…

Have you done any benchmarking on the sizes of the images? I cannot imagine a JPEG math expression, cached by google, is going to take an age to load when viewed in Gmail and not be that large.

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#26

Post by dngray »

aloisdg wrote: post #19
ktpsns wrote: post #4

It would be really nice to have a small and simple markup language, say some markdown standard, to be the layouting language for E-Mails. No (external) images, just links, lists, headings, basic formatting. HTML E-Mails are a security nightmare, even if "only" CSS is "allowed" and JS/iframes/external images are not loaded.

Beside, I am using Markdown in all my email thanks to https://markdown-here.com/ and Thunderbird

Markdown Here appears to be unmaintained and is certainly incompatible with Thunderbird 68.0. I have not been able to raise the developer of it at all and PRs are not being merged.

https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/issues/577

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#27

Post by volument »

longwave wrote: post #15
volument wrote: post #2

This is good! I have searched for this actually. However this seems to lack the most important thing (for me): the global usage percentage of a particular feature, which is the #1 deciding factor whether to use a HTML/CSS feature or not.

I think that would be difficult to calculate accurately. We can collect user-agent statistics from browsers but mail clients don't have an equivalent when reading mail.

A rough estimate would satisfy me at least. Seems Litmus has farily broad statistics from 823 million opened emails: https://emailclientmarketshare.com/ (August 2019)

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#29

Post by ktpsns »

svat wrote: post #22

I'm just now trying to send some mathematics in an email (where most recipients will be reading it in Gmail), so I'm having to figure out what subset of HTML and CSS Gmail supports. (Found this reference for CSS: https://developers.google.com/gmail/design/reference/support... ) It turns out that simply using MathJax or KaTeX and pasting the resulting web page into an email doesn't work: Gmail doesn't support SVG imag…

That's why most folks I know either write a short latex file (and append pdf+tex) or write pseudo code or full latex code because... The recipient understands latex.

But honestly, this is way more portable then mathjax or MathML or whatever. Consider using a latex enabled chat when it really differs.

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