> I set my email clients to use RTF as it’s simpler, more consistent, and one doesn’t send huge email messages full of utterly useless crap (otherwise known as

> I set my email clients to use RTF as it’s simpler, more consistent, and one doesn’t send huge email messages full of utterly useless crap (otherwise known as html tags and stuff) Having written an RTF WYSIWYG editor back in the late 90s, I very much disagree that RTF is any better than HTML for any reasons you’ve cited. It’s still an ASCII encoded format with font tags and alike. It just opts for curly braces instead of triangle brackets. The problem with HTML emails isn’t the HTML specification. It’s that 1. Half of email clients don’t support that specification correctly. 2. People abused HTML in emails However those two points could be just as equally relevant had RTF became the dominant document mark up for the web.