8 ms·
My god, this is never going to die, is it? I mean, I get it. There are some things about plaintext that are nice, or that really appeal to the kind of people w
by ubermonkey 7y ago
My god, this is never going to die, is it?
I mean, I get it. There are some things about plaintext that are nice, or that really appeal to the kind of people who read HN. I used to have arguments about this, too -- but it was 20 years ago. Today, the ship has fucking SAILED.
And you know what? It's GREAT. I send formatted email constantly -- and they're better for it. Being able to embed screenshots is awesome. Being able to use color, or bold, or italics, makes a difference in communication.
It's done. I'm not going back to plaintext, and I can't imagine most people will, either. There's no good reason to (in particular, the downfalls of HTML the author lists are all either easily solved or are issues orthogonal to the format of the email.)
- bachmeier 7y ago> There's no good reason to I used html for years. Once my email volume reached a certain point, I went back to plain text because I can read it and respond to it much faster.
- josho 7y agoNeither you nor the poster provide a reason why. Why is it better? How does plain text make it faster to respond? Or even faster to read?
- zepolen 7y agoimages loading..2% images loading..15% images loading..29% images loading..42% images loading..58% images loading..74% images loading..89% images loading..100% ____________________________________ | | | O O | | O | | \_/ | | MY LOGO | | My catchphrase | | | | | | | |------------------------------------| | | | Hi josho! | | | | This is why it's slower to read! | | | |____________________________________|
- bwat49 7y agoA decent email client will load images asynchronously. Many can also be configured to not load remote content at all until you allow it.
- zepolen 7y agoSo loading the text part of emails only. That's precisely the topic of discussion.
- snowwrestler 7y agoHTML loads even if images do not, which means you still get formatting, bolding, font sizes, clickable links, tables, etc.
- a3n 7y agoThat may be the reason for some people. I disallow loading images until I click, for security and privacy reasons. But I want to see pictures of my aunt's dog if she sends it.
- yyyk 7y agoLoading asynchronously != not loading at all. Asking for permission before rendering external images != not loading at all, even though we could live without external images and just include everything inline.
- scrollaway 7y agoThis isn't a thing, which makes me think you're arguing in bad faith. Clients load images asynchronously, and no personal email is sent with a logo and catchphrase header. I've never seen that in my entire life and I've been using email with a lot of people, for a long time. Formatting is an issue however, and the addition of formatting to email can be useful and add to the conversation. To take the hn example again, the text portion of your comment is broken on mobile because hn doesn't support proper formatting. This has made your comment harder to read.
- masukomi 7y agoit's 99% psychological but I also 100% agree. Just posted a top level comment about how it has absolutely changed my life with regards to email. If you're having trouble keeping up with email and aren't afraid of the command line i _highly_ recommend using a cli client. Neomutt is a bitch to set up because there aren't any good action oriented docs, but it's been worth every bit of effort. There are other clients that are much easier to set up (like alpine) but neomutt has so much power and for me being able to write in markdown and convert to HTML for normal folks was a requirement. the 1% that isn't psychological is how much faster _everything_ is when dealing with a plaintext client (neomutt in my case). "Power Users" use the keyboard to navigate gmail. Normal (neo)mutt users use those _all_ the time and they're faster because there's so much less for the computer to do with each keystroke.
- jeffalyanak 7y agoA well formatted html email has the potential to be much more readable than any plaintext one. The issues come in execution. I find that a very large percentage of the html email I receive is actually hurting readability by way of formatting. On top of that, a sizable percentage who send html email fail to take accessibility into account and leave out important elements like alt tags.
- bachmeier 7y ago> I find that a very large percentage of the html email I receive is actually hurting readability by way of formatting. This is exactly right. In principle, html is just as convenient, but in practice it regularly fails. Something I really hate is a message with big images that add nothing. If I have to scan a message to figure out what's being said, there's a high probability I will leave it for later, which means it never gets read at all.
- scbrg 7y agoI would say that the real performance drain is top posting, which seems to go hand in hand with HTML emails. With top posting, in order to read a mail - especially one that is a few levels deep in a thread - becomes an exercise in jumping back and forth, trying to find context and make sense of who replies to what, finding relevant sentences (often hidden in a mess of signatures). With bottom posting and proper curated quoting, context is a glance away, and it's easy to see who said what in reply to what. I'm sure this would be possible with HTML mails as well, but I've never seen it happen. It's all just a mess of hard to find information in the least sensible order imaginable.
- earthboundkid 7y agoA: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in email?
- kilburn 7y ago> Q. Why is top-posting such a bad thing? It is not, so long as you first quote the relevant part you are replying to. At some point you can also trim the tail as you see fit (I don't find it necessary because my mail client does a good enogh job at hiding that part unless I click on a "show wverything" button. > 2019-07-24 10:50 earthboundkid wrote: > Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? >> 2019-07-23 23:55 someonelse wrote: >> A: Top-posting. >>> 2019-07-23 22:00 first guy wrote: >>> Q: What is the most annoying thing in email?
- adtac 7y agoThat's called interleaved posting and it's the preferred style: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_styl...
- kilburn 7y agoI stand corrected. Technically it appears that I'm advocating for a combination of inline and top posting. Quoting the relevant wikipedia part: > The interleaved reply style can also be combined with top-posting: selected points are quoted and replied to, as above, and then a full copy of the original message is appended.
- munmaek 7y agoI don't want your formatted html, nor does my client render it. You can attach screenshots or link to them. > There's no good reason to There's no good reason for using anything other than plaintext in email. You can use slack, riot, or other chatrooms for the rest.
- glenneroo 7y agoOur offices don't use any of that chatroom crud and I'm extremely thankful for the lack of extra imposed distractions, not to mention the horror stories of being reachable 24/7 because of Slack/Riot/etc. Why require another medium for communication when email works just fine? What is the point in joining a chatroom to talk to one person only to be spammed by everyone else in the room? For those cases where email is insufficient, walking over and talking or making a phone/video call are IMHO better.
- hunter2_ 7y ago> being reachable 24/7 Email and phone are in the same boat, or none of them if you simply turn off the alerts. > another medium for communication when email works just fine When the topic at hand can only be resolved by many round trips, chat is faster because you don't bounce through different interfaces to read vs type. > talk to one person only to be spammed by everyone else in the room Direct message, not a room. > walking over and talking or making a phone/video call That is much more likely (perhaps even guaranteed) to be an interrupt, while chat allows the recipient to choose precisely what things interrupt them.
- munmaek 7y agoHaving slack doesn't necessarily mean having to be reachable 24/7. Chatrooms fill the use case of day-to-day chat and other more short-lived information. As for distractions, that comes down to bad work culture. Hacker News & Lobste.rs are far more distracting for me. I simply get around to slack/email when I get around to it, with the exception of my boss pinging me. Thankfully he only messages me for important things. If you email me I'm going to assume it's something actually important / something that will have some longevity vs some question on slack. Since people wear headphones due to idiotic open workspace culture, messaging someone on slack is far easier than walking up to them (unless your question is actually important/urgent, of which most are not). Your phone or video call better be very important. Those are blockers, especially video calls. I prefer to call the latter time-wasters since, well, they're almost always a complete waste of my time. The only useful video calls I've done are with syncing up with another developer, which I cannot do locally now that I work remotely. Aside from this I prefer leaving the luxury of video calls for my parents.
- wyldfire 7y ago> Being able to use color, or bold, or italics, makes a difference in communication. It really does. Color, especially helps people find the relevant/critical part.
- johannes1234321 7y agoUnless the recepient is color blind or has another impairment. Also instead of highlighting important parts, one might focus on important parts in the first place. That said there are valid uses for formatting. But unfortunately most of the formatted mails are harder to digest than needed. Especially if it becomes a longer exchange and people start highlighting in quoted mails.
- pmlnr 7y agoNo, this is not true at all. People will _only_ read the color part and skip anything else, which is equally bad to not finding it immediately, if not worse. And there are also color blind people for whom the color might be even worse than the lack of it.
- astrobe_ 7y agoYes. The argument almost defeats itself: why do you waste my time with irrelevant stuff? Why did you make read a whole page of details before coming to the critical point? That has been my experience: make your messages as short and straight to the point as possible. Put the most important stuff first and the gory details only the curious will read, last. That goes for documentation too. HTML mail gives the illusion that fancy formatting can make up for mediocre writing skills. That's sad, because no amount of bold face, color or indentation can fix an inconsistently structured piece. You learn that stuff at school, make your tuition fees (and/or the time you have been forced to invested in it instead of being young and having fun) worth it.
- scbrg 7y agoYou could also skip the irrelevant parts. That too makes it easy to find the relevant part :-)
- 7y ago
- u801e 7y ago> Being able to embed screenshots is awesome. Being able to use color, or bold, or italics, makes a difference in communication. Yet, you cannot do any of that on HN (other than a limited case like italic). But, we can communicate just fine without those features. I suppose it's really a difference of a read once message versus having a discussion. In a read once message, you can format it like you describe. That's how most blogs and web pages work. But if you want to have a discussion, then plain text with very limited markup works best since it minimizes the required vertical scrolling and it allows you to see the overall discussion since you can view more messages in the given screen space.
- neuronic 7y agoCommunicating just fine is not the same as communicating at optimum. In the analog world, you could just hand over a white, plaintext birthday card. Or you could give one with a motive, color, some doodles and maybe a memorable photograph attached. Which one is more memorable? "It's used by marketing." is not an arguments against it. We have sophisticated spam filters. Update your rules then.
- zepolen 7y agoGo and visit a forum where embedded images are allowed and tell me that there is any sort of "optimum" discussion over there. In the end what happens is people use text overlays in the IMAGES in order to reply to each other. Since you edited your response to mention the birthday card: Yea - on the one hand you can leave a boring "Happy Birthday" message with lots of glitter to make it memorable. Or you can make the message memorable.
- tripzilch 7y agoPlease relax and think of the commenting guide lines.
- nwah1 7y agoI consider this to be more like a polemic to shift the overton window of acceptable email restrictions. Probably much of what we enable in email could be restricted without loss of actual useful features. Each feature adds attack surface, complexity, and compatibility concerns that can be avoided by using the simplest possible subset of features.
- rapind 7y agoIt won't die, because the argument has the same merit today that it always has. That being said, I think it's useful to attach images to an email (not necessarily embed them in the content of the email, but attach them for sure). IMO HTML email is worse today than it's ever been. Often when I get an HTML email it takes me longer to parse it. On the bright side, the presence of HTML is a decent indicator of a marketing email that can safely be ignored.
- ubermonkey 7y ago>the presence of HTML is a decent indicator of a marketing email that can safely be ignored. Enable that as a filter, and you'd get fired SO FAST in most of the places I work.
- abjKT26nO8 7y agoWhat I hate about HTML email is that it tends to set its own font size, sometimes even font face. Like... Keep your dirty hands away from my config of how I like my mails to be displayed when I read them. But no, every mail is now a snowflake and has to have its own styling, even though it doesn't provide any value.
- edgarvaldes 7y agoAgreed. I just hate the backgrounds some people put in email. In those cases I swicth to plain text in the response.