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IMO, HTML was the worst thing that ever happened to email. Plain text content is the best content.
by candiddevmike 2y ago
IMO, HTML was the worst thing that ever happened to email. Plain text content is the best content.
- astrodust 2y agoIt's easy to say this, but can you imagine the hodge-podge of proprietary garbage we'd have to deal with if you couldn't email a simple file attachment to someone?
- arjvik 2y agoCan still do plain text with attachments... unless you expect that companies would move to emailing you HTML files of their message?
- candiddevmike 2y agoI think that hodge podge (OneDrive, Google drive, Dropbox, etc) is what most people already use. "Simple file attachments" are an oxymoron these days--size/extension restrictions, spam scores, not to mention the hell of iterating over email.
- kiwijamo 2y agoDepends on your use case. Sometimes I want to send a document and not have the receiver change it at their whims. E.g. quotes for jobs. Simple attachments are great for that. Also I find some people who aren't good with tech find attachments much easier to deal with. If I send a an attachment I am 100% confident the other person can open it. No so for sharing links etc.
- smsm42 2y agoI'm good with attachment when you need to send me a real document, but if the email text itself ends up being multi-megabyte blob because you absolutely must have your name in the signature in blue and italic, then I tend to frown upon this. Over decades of my work I probably sent thousands of emails, yet very rarely if ever I needed HTML capabilities, and pretty much never ones that go beyond very basic Markup formatting.
- hollerith 2y agoI'm confused. How is HTML needed to attach a file (or to open the attachment)?
- astrodust 2y agoMIME is needed, and with MIME, HTML is basically right there, so people are going to use it.
- hollerith 2y agoHTML is not needed for attachments to work. If the government for example, banned all use of HTML in emails, people could still attach (non-HTML) files to emails the same way they do now. Therefore the comment I replied to, a defense of HTML in emails, is a bogus argument.
- anamexis 2y agoThe point is that attachments are needed to make HTML work. If you have attachments, you have HTML emails.
- throw0101c 2y ago> The point is that attachments are needed to make HTML work. They are not. MIME headers are helpful for telling MUAs what the content (type and/or disposition) of a message is, but there's nothing from stoping mail clients from just putting "raw" HTML in the body of an e-mail message without MIME.
- feikname 2y agoEmail attachments are defined through MIME and don't depend at all on HTML being available as a Content-Type. We could well have had another format and attachments together.
- djbusby 2y agoYea! `text/rtf` FTW!
- StableAlkyne 2y agoThat's a completely valid opinion, and I prefer plaintext as well But at this point, it's pretty clear that most non-technical people prefer emails with fancy text and graphics. Personally, I'm just glad that email is a flexible enough medium to allow that. It's better than the alternative, where people moved to some closed, proprietary protocol behind like 20 patents that allows the same thing. Is there any other common way we communicate over screens (aside from http) that has had the staying power of email for the general public? I think that's a testament to the sheer flexibility of it. The ugliness that people have contorted email into is a badge of honor IMO
- throw0101c 2y ago> But at this point, it's pretty clear that most non-technical people prefer emails with fancy text and graphics. And what percentage of e-mails from people / human beings have those things? Certainly marketing e-mails have fancy formats, but I've rarely seen any person at a companies I've worked at use any kind of formatting: generally most folks hit reply and start typing with whatever the default is. Hardly any italics or bold, and forget about fixed width (for things like CLI commands in technical discussions). Heck, even Slack messages these styles are hardly used (on my current team I use them the most since I know that Markdown so it's easy for me to throw in some **, //, or `` in my typing flow, so I can highlight hostnames, CLI commands, etc).
- gertop 2y agoAny e-commerce email showing you pictures of what you bought. People tend to find this convenient.
- wrycoder 2y agoMy wife has a fastmail account, but she uses her iMail client, so she can send inline photos with her email. Even FM can’t do that yet.
- brongondwana 2y agoHuh? You can paste if you have an image in your buffer, or drag-drop image files into an email in the Fastmail composer. I paste images into emails from screenshots almost every day. (I'll take this report as a "we need to make it clearer you can do this!")
- jordanreger 2y agoPretty much the only credit I'll give to Amazon is that they give the option to get plaintext emails. Doesn't mask the larger problems, but still a nice thing I wish was the norm.
- HelmetFigNewton 2y agoAmazon deserves zero credit for anything regarding E-mail, because their "order confirmations" don't say WHAT YOU ORDERED. Mind-bogglingly stupid and annoying.
- derrikcurran 2y agoI think that's because they don't want email providers, Gmail in particular, scraping for purchase history
- HelmetFigNewton 2y agoThat should be up to the recipient. Every other vendor provides this essential information in order confirmations. Amazon's refusal to do so means you can't search your E-mail history for purchases (at tax time, for example). Or for warranty info or service. You may not know where you bought a particular item. Or which Amazon account you might have used. If everyone followed Amazon's anti-customer example, you'd have to log into every E-commerce site you ever bought something from and search your order history... year by year... to find something. Unacceptable BS.
- legitster 2y ago> Plain text content is the best content. Hard disagree. Things like bolding text, adding pictures, changing colors, etc are very important for the emails I send. So some amount of HTML is important to me.
- arp242 2y agoLack of ability to distinguish between pre-formatted text and regular prose alone makes it a complete non-starter for most who aren't reading monospaced text in a terminal. I don't really like reading monospace text for prose (many people don't), and using proportional fonts means things that are supposed to be aligned will break (and if you restrict yourself to text only, you'll find yourself aligning things on occasion for tables or other content). I actually use plain text in FastMail because it's "better" than HTML (usually), but it's not good. Ability to send text/markdown natively would be pretty brilliant.
- brongondwana 2y agoCtrl-D to format the selected text as monospace in the Fastmail composer is pretty nice - I use it often for sending bits of log line or terminal output when writing up incidents or describing how to do something.
- HelmetFigNewton 2y agoRTF would be fine, then.
- jeltz 2y agoYes, it would be. It is a pity HTML won over RTF.
- ktosobcy 2y agoplain-text with some sort of simple formatting would be fine (markdown/asciidoc). We don't have to go overboard in the opposite direction...
- prmoustache 2y ago
- Dylan16807 2y agoWeird limited HTML isn't fun, but images, basic layout, and some amount of font control are all pretty important features.
- cortesoft 2y agoI like being able to email in line photos
- nox101 2y agoThis reads me as "I prefer letters" or "I prefer fax" HTML is what non-techies want, or rather, they want to insert pictures and videos directly inline. They want to bold and highlight. They want bullet lists and numbered lists. They want to change fonts, make headlines, etc.. And they want it all to reflow for their device. I do to. I don't want to say in the 70s terminal. I get that lots of techies wish the world was still 80 column monochrome ASCII only but you're the exception.
- medstrom 2y ago"80 column monochrome ASCII only" Mmm... Paradise
- nebulous1 2y agoI think the "techies" that you are referring to just see the issues with html email that the non-techies don't notice. Some of course just want things to be more like the 80-column monochrome that you mention, but for most it's not that extreme. I think HTML is way too complicated for email, and it would have been much better if they'd standardised on a version of markdown. That ship has sailed though, so we're stuck between using HTML or plain text.
- lelanthran 2y ago> IMO, HTML was the worst thing that ever happened to email. Plain text content is the best content. Your first statement might be true (it's debatable). Your second is definitely false. Lets assume that HTML really was the worst thing that ever happened to email. Plain text content for email is still not the best content. People want to: 1. Click on a link in the email, not fumble with copy and paste on their phone. 2. See decently formatted paragraphs and content with bold, italics and different font sizes for headings and paragraphs, not a wall of text. 3. See images in the email itself, not have to once again fumble around with copy and paste. 4. Correctly formatted bullet points, including sub-lists. For all of the above, some sort of format is required. If we exclude HTML as a possibility, you're still going to have to need a format of some type, because the wall-o-text format is not a good UI.
- makapuf 2y agoA subset of markdown (since you can use html in markdown) might be a good candidate.
- prmoustache 2y agoI would have favored gemtext to avoid the temptation of re-adding html support to a dumbed down markdown flavor.
- ivanjermakov 2y agoRegarding 1. it's up to the client to parse and highlight links in plain text.
- lelanthran 2y ago> Regarding 1. it's up to the client to parse and highlight links in plain text. If the client is interpreting the content and then displaying its interpretation to the user, then it's not plain text anymore, is it? It's a format; in this case it's a poorly-specified, ad-hoc format and broken format[1] that is worse than simply having a reduced ad-hoc HTML format. Just like HTML is "plain text" which is interpreted by the client and that interpretation is displayed to the user. [1] For example, what if the sender types in `You should go to http://ww.example.com http://ww.example.com, where "example" must be replaced with your company name`? Suddenly `www.example.com` has an unintended DDoS!
- mavhc 2y agoSurely lack of soft wrapping in the first version was the worst thing to happen to email, that breaks quoting, which leads to top posting. Also lack of a signature section, relying on weird -- \n hacks
- nedt 2y agoWorst thing is spam. Second worst is silos by big players to fight spam, which makes it hard to run your own email server. Then comes HTML.
- iamacyborg 2y agoMaking it hard to run your own server seems to be a small price to pay to ensure billions of inboxes don’t get overly spammed.
- nedt 2y agoIt's not like many spammers are using SPF and DKIM. And then you have google sending bounce emails to spam although they already know with SPF that the original mail came from somewhere else making them the spammers.