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Or, based on the evidence... ... Microsoft and Yahoo think it's a good idea and want to support it. There's no particular reason email needs to sit around in t

Or, based on the evidence... ... Microsoft and Yahoo think it's a good idea and want to support it. There's no particular reason email needs to sit around in the gutter while the rest of the web gets more multimedia and more performant.

dragonwriter 8y ago
> There's no particular reason email needs to sit around in the gutter while the rest of the web gets more multimedia and more performant. Email is not part of the web, and more multimedia and more round trips is not more performant, it's the opposite.
- fixermark 8y ago
  > Email is not part of the web Content-Type: text/html seems to disagree with your assertion.
  - mftrhu 8y ago
    The HTML documentation sitting in my /usr/share/doc does not make it part of the web. The output from man -H is not part of the web, no matter what its mime type is. HTML is not the same as the web.
- jxdxbx 8y ago
  Email should be plain text. HTML in email itself was a terrible idea, though not as bad as AMP in email.
  - felixfbecker 8y ago
    Some HTML in email is fine, I would say the subset that can be expressed by markdown. Making text bold, italic etc should be possible. The real problem I have is how limited email HTML/CSS and email clients are compared to the web, so that every "rich" email will use table layouts that render terribly on mobile.
    - Aeolun 8y ago
      But still better than anything else that could reasonably be achieved. Tables are pretty much the only cross-platform/client way to format email.
  - Zenst 8y ago
    Technically email is plaintext, though for the definition you aspire towards, it was in the early days. But then various RFC's added this and that and now email processing/sanitisation is scary. But then email is one large unsanitized input that has so many rules to be applied, what could go wrong. That's why email attachments alone are an utter MIME-field when it comes to security.
    - rjzzleep 8y ago
      Pure gold pun right here: > That's why email attachments alone are an utter MIME-field when it comes to security. And yes, remember the 35C3 talk on e2e email security. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKjtZy87iI0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKjtZy87iI0
      - Zenst 8y ago
        > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKjtZy87iI0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKjtZy87iI0 Not seen that, watching now (about half way thru) and nice to retouch upon a feild I've not working in for many years and seeing how not much has changed. Equally a little depressing, to see the same types of problems 10 years on.
  - tzs 8y ago
    > Email should be plain text. That ship sailed the moment it got named email, leading people to think of it as an electronic form of mail, and so to expect that eventually it could be used for any documents you would send by mail. With mail, I can send anything I can print or handwrite on paper, which includes text in multiple fonts, graphics, charts, tables, in a variety of colors. I can also include anything that fits in the envelope, so I can include files on floppy or disc or memory card or a thin thumb drive. Sure, earlier email systems could not handle anything more than plain text, but because it was called email many people assumed that was just because common computers and displays didn't have the capability to handle more. Once the GUI became prevalent for home and office computers, rich email was inevitable. In retrospect, if the people who designed the earlier email systems had wanted the restriction to plain text to be a design goal, rather than just a consequence of the technology of the day, they should have named it etelegram to make it clear.
    - freddie_mercury 8y ago
      There's been rich-text email since (at least) 1980 and by the mid- to late-1980s there were many competing efforts: CMU's AMS, BBN's Diamond/Slate, NeXT's NeXTMail, and probably several others. I'd go so far as to argue that the parent's reaction -- "email should be plain-text" -- is exactly why the horrors of HTML are what we have today. No one adopted any of the better alternatives out there and then Netscape -- a web browser, after all -- hacked in HTML mail, and "worse is better" won the day yet again.
- JimDabell 8y ago
  > Email is not part of the web The web is not just what happens in a web browser: > An information object is "on the web" if it has a URI. — Tim Berners-Lee, Axioms of Web Architecture, https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms.html https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms.html
  - riffraff 8y ago
    so, not emails? I can't refer to an email via URI, as far as I know.
    - begriffs 8y ago
      Every email message has a unique identifier called the Message-Id, but SMTP does not host messages with an HTTP URI. Serving public URIs for messages must be done by separate web servers like a webmail client, or a mail archiving tool such as Pipermail.
      - JimDabell 8y ago
        > an HTTP URI Note that there's no requirement for something to be an HTTP URI specifically. Any URI will do.
        begriffs 8y ago
        Good point, there are URIs for other protocols (like FTP, Gopher etc).
        tekknik 8y ago
        Yet still, without a webmail client (a client that specifically takes an offline protocol and puts it on the “web”) email would not have a URI. You an “link” to a mailbox, but not create a particular mail with a particular identifier then later retrieve it with that same URI. The URI identifies the users mailbox, NOT their mail.
    - JimDabell 8y ago
      Wait, the original claim was: > Email is not part of the web That's "email", not "emails". I understood that to mean email the concept / technology, not "emails" as in individual email resources. By that reading, yes, email is on the web. You can link to a mailbox with the mailto: URI scheme. If you read it as "Individual emails are not on the web" instead, then webmail seems to cover that.
Bartweiss 8y ago
> sit around in the gutter while the rest of the web gets more multimedia and more performant I (sincerely) appreciate reminders like this of just how much online opinions and experiences vary. My sense of the last few years of web changes is that performance is mostly a product of script-blocking or AMP-degraded functionality, and new multimedia is mostly a user-hostile attempt to boost revenue. Whether it's five-point stories broken across five page loads, Reddit's "use our app" links breaking in AMP, or Techcrunch's insane scroll-down-to-redirect-to-homepage layout, the last ~3 years of web development are full of changes I find actively negative. I understand the fight over something like AMP for email much better when I remember how far from universal that is. It's not really a surprise there's so much disagreement over what to do next when there's this much divide over what's working well at present.
- danudey 8y ago
  AMP seems less like a response to 'the web is slow' and more a response to 'people who are tired of slow websites are using content blockers so we need an alternative so they don't block our ads'.
  - lern_too_spel 8y ago
    It's a solution to the web is not instant, which closed proprietary competing solutions like Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News solve.
UI_at_80x24 8y ago
>gets more multimedia and more performant More performant then text? What are you comparing it to smoke signals FFS? And let me see if I understand you correctly, you _WANT_ multimedia in your emails? What is the point? To send miniature versions of web-pages?!?
- fixermark 8y ago
  Yes. The advantages of HTML in an email are well-documented in the TC article and the Google announcement. I would make use of that, personally.
  - JohnFen 8y ago
    Those "advantages" are very weak, at best.
  - UI_at_80x24 8y ago
    None of those "Advantages" were advantageous to the end user. This only benefits Google or other corporations, and anything that benefits them harms me.
    - fixermark 8y ago
      With respect, "anything that benefits corporations harms me" is a weird attitude. AMP in email could, hypothetically, allow me to hit the "checkin to my flight" button for a Southwest flight directly from my confirmation email without having to bump over to their website. That's cool, convenient, and simplifies my life. It also benefits the corporation (their resource allocation is easier if they have a firm count of flyers) and it benefits Google (I'm more likely to use an email client that facilitates this). The business world is full of win-wins, and this has the potential to be one of them.
      - gwenzek 8y ago
        > checkin to my flight button You can do that in HTML email too. Newsletter have an "unsubscribe" button, calendar invites have a yes/no/maybe button.
JohnFen 8y ago
> There's no particular reason email needs to sit around in the gutter while the rest of the web gets more In my view, that's not "email sitting around in the gutter", that's "email retaining things that make it valuable". Also, email is not, and should not be, the web -- so "the rest of the web" is a bit of a nonsequitor.
- baroffoos 8y ago
  Email has in some ways sat around in the gutter but media reasons are not why. The protocols are insanely complex and archaic and you need about 20 bits of software to actually run an email server. And then its all completely insecure because email was never built with end to end crypto. imap is so insane that every email provider reinvented it to have a sane api for their web client and app. Fastmail also created JMAP to have a standard json api for email.
AlexandrB 8y ago
> There's no particular reason email needs to sit around in the gutter while the rest of the web gets more multimedia and more performant. "The rest of the web" is the ad-laden, tracker-infested, bloated gutter of the internet. Email is (was?) a little morsel of the old open internet (along with RSS/podcasts) that has not yet drowned in the morass.
baroffoos 8y ago
How could email possibly be more performant? Its just a few blocks of text. I click on the email and it loads instantly because its already downloaded.
- hedora 8y ago
  I think you’re looking at performance all wrong. How long until the sender’s ad targeting subcontractors know you read it? How long until they can act on that information to manipulate you into sending cash, voting to sabotage the government, or otherwise act against your own interests? With static email, all of these latencies are in the days, or at least hours. With amp email, it can be accomplished in 100’s of milliseconds.
Mirioron 8y ago
>There's no particular reason email needs to sit around in the gutter while the rest of the web gets more multimedia and more performant. No technology has angered me more in the last few years than AMP. I have literally switched my main search engine just so I don't have to deal with AMP. At no point have I ever appreciated AMP. It has only been a disadvantage.
kerng 8y ago
Google's mail and calendar experience is already horrible and confusing. This is gonna just make it worse.
venj 8y ago
The only thing that needs to be more performant in my email experience is the gmail UI.

dragonwriter 8y ago

> There's no particular reason email needs to sit around in the gutter while the rest of the web gets more multimedia and more performant. Email is not part of the web, and more multimedia and more round trips is not more performant, it's the opposite.

fixermark 8y ago
> Email is not part of the web Content-Type: text/html seems to disagree with your assertion.
- mftrhu 8y ago
  The HTML documentation sitting in my /usr/share/doc does not make it part of the web. The output from man -H is not part of the web, no matter what its mime type is. HTML is not the same as the web.
jxdxbx 8y ago
Email should be plain text. HTML in email itself was a terrible idea, though not as bad as AMP in email.
- felixfbecker 8y ago
  Some HTML in email is fine, I would say the subset that can be expressed by markdown. Making text bold, italic etc should be possible. The real problem I have is how limited email HTML/CSS and email clients are compared to the web, so that every "rich" email will use table layouts that render terribly on mobile.
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    But still better than anything else that could reasonably be achieved. Tables are pretty much the only cross-platform/client way to format email.
- Zenst 8y ago
  Technically email is plaintext, though for the definition you aspire towards, it was in the early days. But then various RFC's added this and that and now email processing/sanitisation is scary. But then email is one large unsanitized input that has so many rules to be applied, what could go wrong. That's why email attachments alone are an utter MIME-field when it comes to security.
  - rjzzleep 8y ago
    Pure gold pun right here: > That's why email attachments alone are an utter MIME-field when it comes to security. And yes, remember the 35C3 talk on e2e email security. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKjtZy87iI0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKjtZy87iI0
    - Zenst 8y ago
      > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKjtZy87iI0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKjtZy87iI0 Not seen that, watching now (about half way thru) and nice to retouch upon a feild I've not working in for many years and seeing how not much has changed. Equally a little depressing, to see the same types of problems 10 years on.
- tzs 8y ago
  > Email should be plain text. That ship sailed the moment it got named email, leading people to think of it as an electronic form of mail, and so to expect that eventually it could be used for any documents you would send by mail. With mail, I can send anything I can print or handwrite on paper, which includes text in multiple fonts, graphics, charts, tables, in a variety of colors. I can also include anything that fits in the envelope, so I can include files on floppy or disc or memory card or a thin thumb drive. Sure, earlier email systems could not handle anything more than plain text, but because it was called email many people assumed that was just because common computers and displays didn't have the capability to handle more. Once the GUI became prevalent for home and office computers, rich email was inevitable. In retrospect, if the people who designed the earlier email systems had wanted the restriction to plain text to be a design goal, rather than just a consequence of the technology of the day, they should have named it etelegram to make it clear.
  - freddie_mercury 8y ago
    There's been rich-text email since (at least) 1980 and by the mid- to late-1980s there were many competing efforts: CMU's AMS, BBN's Diamond/Slate, NeXT's NeXTMail, and probably several others. I'd go so far as to argue that the parent's reaction -- "email should be plain-text" -- is exactly why the horrors of HTML are what we have today. No one adopted any of the better alternatives out there and then Netscape -- a web browser, after all -- hacked in HTML mail, and "worse is better" won the day yet again.
JimDabell 8y ago
> Email is not part of the web The web is not just what happens in a web browser: > An information object is "on the web" if it has a URI. — Tim Berners-Lee, Axioms of Web Architecture, https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms.html https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms.html
- riffraff 8y ago
  so, not emails? I can't refer to an email via URI, as far as I know.
  - begriffs 8y ago
    Every email message has a unique identifier called the Message-Id, but SMTP does not host messages with an HTTP URI. Serving public URIs for messages must be done by separate web servers like a webmail client, or a mail archiving tool such as Pipermail.
    - JimDabell 8y ago
      > an HTTP URI Note that there's no requirement for something to be an HTTP URI specifically. Any URI will do.
      - begriffs 8y ago
        Good point, there are URIs for other protocols (like FTP, Gopher etc).
      - tekknik 8y ago
        Yet still, without a webmail client (a client that specifically takes an offline protocol and puts it on the “web”) email would not have a URI. You an “link” to a mailbox, but not create a particular mail with a particular identifier then later retrieve it with that same URI. The URI identifies the users mailbox, NOT their mail.
  - JimDabell 8y ago
    Wait, the original claim was: > Email is not part of the web That's "email", not "emails". I understood that to mean email the concept / technology, not "emails" as in individual email resources. By that reading, yes, email is on the web. You can link to a mailbox with the mailto: URI scheme. If you read it as "Individual emails are not on the web" instead, then webmail seems to cover that.

Bartweiss 8y ago

> sit around in the gutter while the rest of the web gets more multimedia and more performant I (sincerely) appreciate reminders like this of just how much online opinions and experiences vary. My sense of the last few years of web changes is that performance is mostly a product of script-blocking or AMP-degraded functionality, and new multimedia is mostly a user-hostile attempt to boost revenue. Whether it's five-point stories broken across five page loads, Reddit's "use our app" links breaking in AMP, or Techcrunch's insane scroll-down-to-redirect-to-homepage layout, the last ~3 years of web development are full of changes I find actively negative. I understand the fight over something like AMP for email much better when I remember how far from universal that is. It's not really a surprise there's so much disagreement over what to do next when there's this much divide over what's working well at present.

danudey 8y ago
AMP seems less like a response to 'the web is slow' and more a response to 'people who are tired of slow websites are using content blockers so we need an alternative so they don't block our ads'.
- lern_too_spel 8y ago
  It's a solution to the web is not instant, which closed proprietary competing solutions like Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News solve.

UI_at_80x24 8y ago

>gets more multimedia and more performant More performant then text? What are you comparing it to smoke signals FFS? And let me see if I understand you correctly, you _WANT_ multimedia in your emails? What is the point? To send miniature versions of web-pages?!?

fixermark 8y ago
Yes. The advantages of HTML in an email are well-documented in the TC article and the Google announcement. I would make use of that, personally.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  Those "advantages" are very weak, at best.
- UI_at_80x24 8y ago
  None of those "Advantages" were advantageous to the end user. This only benefits Google or other corporations, and anything that benefits them harms me.
  - fixermark 8y ago
    With respect, "anything that benefits corporations harms me" is a weird attitude. AMP in email could, hypothetically, allow me to hit the "checkin to my flight" button for a Southwest flight directly from my confirmation email without having to bump over to their website. That's cool, convenient, and simplifies my life. It also benefits the corporation (their resource allocation is easier if they have a firm count of flyers) and it benefits Google (I'm more likely to use an email client that facilitates this). The business world is full of win-wins, and this has the potential to be one of them.
    - gwenzek 8y ago
      > checkin to my flight button You can do that in HTML email too. Newsletter have an "unsubscribe" button, calendar invites have a yes/no/maybe button.

JohnFen 8y ago

> There's no particular reason email needs to sit around in the gutter while the rest of the web gets more In my view, that's not "email sitting around in the gutter", that's "email retaining things that make it valuable". Also, email is not, and should not be, the web -- so "the rest of the web" is a bit of a nonsequitor.

baroffoos 8y ago
Email has in some ways sat around in the gutter but media reasons are not why. The protocols are insanely complex and archaic and you need about 20 bits of software to actually run an email server. And then its all completely insecure because email was never built with end to end crypto. imap is so insane that every email provider reinvented it to have a sane api for their web client and app. Fastmail also created JMAP to have a standard json api for email.

AlexandrB 8y ago

> There's no particular reason email needs to sit around in the gutter while the rest of the web gets more multimedia and more performant. "The rest of the web" is the ad-laden, tracker-infested, bloated gutter of the internet. Email is (was?) a little morsel of the old open internet (along with RSS/podcasts) that has not yet drowned in the morass.

baroffoos 8y ago

How could email possibly be more performant? Its just a few blocks of text. I click on the email and it loads instantly because its already downloaded.

hedora 8y ago
I think you’re looking at performance all wrong. How long until the sender’s ad targeting subcontractors know you read it? How long until they can act on that information to manipulate you into sending cash, voting to sabotage the government, or otherwise act against your own interests? With static email, all of these latencies are in the days, or at least hours. With amp email, it can be accomplished in 100’s of milliseconds.

Mirioron 8y ago

>There's no particular reason email needs to sit around in the gutter while the rest of the web gets more multimedia and more performant. No technology has angered me more in the last few years than AMP. I have literally switched my main search engine just so I don't have to deal with AMP. At no point have I ever appreciated AMP. It has only been a disadvantage.

kerng 8y ago

Google's mail and calendar experience is already horrible and confusing. This is gonna just make it worse.

venj 8y ago

The only thing that needs to be more performant in my email experience is the gmail UI.