5 ms·
HTML email was a mistake. I believe the guilty party is Microsoft with Outlook 97. https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-outlook/97 https://winworldpc.com/p
by lysace 1y ago
HTML email was a mistake. I believe the guilty party is Microsoft with Outlook 97.
https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-outlook/97 https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-outlook/97
- scarface_74 1y agoI think Apple is the guilty party of starting it first with OpenDoc based CyberDog released in 1996.
- kyralis 1y agoCan we really blame OpenDoc for anything, though? It seems more sad than impactful, honestly.
- robocat 1y agohttps://wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc https://wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc Interesting because everybody was competing: but competing for a concept that is now largely obsolete because it failed? Some modern competition (e.g. AI) has a similar feel.
- sokoloff 1y agoOpenDoc did at least provide part of the question’s premise for one of my favorite Steve Jobs answers: https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o?si=1n-rkSke_ezLcidn https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o?si=1n-rkSke_ezLcidn
- scarface_74 1y agoI was on Usenet at the time and Apple also had a newsreader. There were post from Mac users with Mime encoded messages that everyone else hated.
- superjan 1y agoIn my recollection it was Netscape, this appers to confirm it: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2017/09/html-email-was-that-your-fault/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2017/09/html-email-was-that-your-fa...
- weinzierl 1y agoFrom my recollection Microsoft pushed their own RTF like rich mail format hard for a while and did support HTML only reluctantly.
- account42 1y agoThey still support HTML only reluctantly.
- donnachangstein 1y agoThanks for linking to a picture of testicles.
- stickfigure 1y agoThat particular blog author displays special content if the referrer is HN. It's embarrassingly juvenile for someone that must be in their 50s by now.
- opello 1y agoHaving had that a few times, and recently relaxing Firefox's referer policy for some other site compatibility which had avoided it before, I came to this workaround with uBlock Origin: jwz.org##^responseheader(set-cookie) jwz.org##^responseheader(location) Hopefully documenting it doesn't perpetuate the arms race.
- superjan 1y agoOh sorry, I did not know that was the guy who hates being linked to from HN. Copy the link manually to read it if you still care to learn what he wrote.
- zzo38computer 1y agoI use a email client without HTML email. I have not had problems with this.
- ninjin 1y agoYou are not the only one and whenever there is no text/plain there is webdump: https://codemadness.org/git/webdump/file/README.html https://codemadness.org/git/webdump/file/README.html
- pwdisswordfishz 1y agoWell, HTML e-mail arbitrarily stylable by the author was a mistake. This could have been avoided by a profile of HTML that removes presentation markup and CSS, leaving only pure semantic markup that a client can render in a "reader mode" equivalent.
- lproven 1y ago> HTML e-mail arbitrarily stylable by the author was a mistake. No, I agree with the original comment. Formatting is bad for accessibility, bad for spoofing and spamming, bad for quoting and highlighting, and more besides. It is bad in general. Always was. https://useplaintext.email/ https://useplaintext.email/
- diggan 1y agoWell, except for the case when you want a unique-looking email, with your own style, then plaintext kind of sucks :) Sure, we could argue that people shouldn't want that, but then reality tends to be somewhat annoying like that.
- lproven 1y agoAnd yet, we all coped with SMS. Despite this terrible burden on people's SpArkLiNg 0rIg1n4l cReAtIviTy we send TRILLIONS a year. https://www.intradyn.com/text-message-statistics-trends/ https://www.intradyn.com/text-message-statistics-trends/ It's not so bad. You can live with it. Being CREATIVE and expressing your personality damages the medium and impairs conveying your message. So: don't.
- diggan 1y ago> And yet, we all coped with SMS. We literally didn't, otherwise MMS wouldn't have been as popular as it was :) Personally I too prefer plaintext in almost every case. But I also understand why people don't share that preference.
- 1y ago
- k4rli 1y agoSome sites don't even bother anymore and just send the contents as a multi-MB image. Sort of "pdf as email" to not bother checking if the template works for all sorts of mail clients.
- macguillicuddy 1y agoI wonder if, in the pipe dream that email were magically replaced by something more modern, we'd use something like markdown instead.
- chrisjj 1y agoHow would that help here?
- sureIy 1y agoHTML was a mistake. What if browsers just returned texts with links and auto-linked and auto-embedded them like markdown does? Only on request. A true user agent. Well, I would have settled for HTML 1 for the forms.