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I always wish we could go back to plaintext emails.
by jeena 10y ago
I always wish we could go back to plaintext emails.
- sumoboy 10y agoWhy not just go back to morse code.
- hueving 10y agoBecause it's harder to read.
- haimez 10y agoPlus the accessibility story is a nightmare.
- toast0 10y agoMorse is readily adaptable to whatever you can sense: I've experienced it with sound, light, and vibration. Taste, heat, and smell might not work so well. For input, you need to be able to reliably close and open a switch. This may be difficult for people with tremors, but many accessibility systems are built around single bit inputs, so it's a start. If you can manage another input method, it can be translated to Morse as well. Internationalization is harder, it's not a good fit for non-alphabetic languages.
- haimez 10y agoYou are correct, I was being snide. Morse code is highly translatable to other senses assuming that the audience had a reason to learn it. I can't think of a single disability with lack of temporal awareness, and only a few with impediments to temporal perception (as you noted). That said, I don't know ANY blind sea captains. This will be a problem for adoption.
- Alex3917 10y agoPretty much every single html email also has a plaintext version attached, otherwise it hurts the deliverability. You just need to set your email client to use the plaintext version.
- tedunangst 10y ago"Your client does not support HTML." Yeah, thanks. I'm doubly ecstatic when the unsubscribe link is in the HTML version and not the text version.
- pferde 10y agoIf only.
- CaptSpify 10y agoOne of the benefits of using a text-based email client, is that it forces emails to be text.
- taeric 10y agoSadly... no it doesn't. I use emacs for my email, and while I could make it not render html email at all, the vast majority of my correspondence is with people sending rich emails through outlook. So... yeah, html it is.
- CaptSpify 10y agoyeah, it does. There are tricks to make it try to look like rendered html, but they all fall flat IME, and it ends up coming across as text. If you get rid of that expectation, it works fine. I get plenty of html emails every day, but all I see is text.
- taeric 10y agoI think we were just talking past each other. I took your statement to mean convincing others to stop sending HTML emails. You meant it more to just focus on the text. (If I am reading correctly.) In that, yes, I agree. Bonus points for being able to inline respond to messages again. (I hate Outlook's forcing top posting.)
- CaptSpify 10y agoAh yes. I was confused by your response. That makes more sense. No, I generally don't ask push others to use text-based email, but when asked, I explain the difference with a definite preference for text. One thing that seems to have helped me (but is very much YMMV), is when I reply, it keeps the html code all messed up. Then when the person I'm discussing with sees that, they'll occasionally ask me why their email is messed up. That gives me an opportunity to explain html vs text, and they usually would rather their email "work everywhere".