It really is surprising, especially how sophisticated the email specification is (since it had to deal with gateways and multiple non-Internet networks, etc.).

It really is surprising, especially how sophisticated the email specification is (since it had to deal with gateways and multiple non-Internet networks, etc.). But, perhaps history has something of an answer here: it took email decades to work out how to handle multimedia, with all sorts of false starts and poor standards, so, perhaps HTML email is really just the continuation of this?