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Lots of strangely negative reactions here. We (http://inky.com http://inky.com) think this is a positive development and plan to support it as well. We're happy

Lots of strangely negative reactions here. We (http://inky.com http://inky.com) think this is a positive development and plan to support it as well. We're happy Google has promoted open standards in doing this.

diffsir 13y ago
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planetjones 13y ago
I don't think the reactions are strange at all. Google have a bad track record in implementing things and then abandoning them for one. I want my email to be a consistent experience - not to get some different behavior if I access through a certain device. Email and its simplicity was universal - I saw the same text on my phone, tablet, laptop and desktop. Will every mail sender who makes use of this, include the JSON and an alternative link to achieve the same result. I think this could get very inconsistent very quickly. Fragmenting email is not something I like the idea of. For Google Apps customers' internal mails I think this is useful. For the wider Internet I don't like it.
- dmbaggett 13y ago
  I see your point, but consistency of email display went out the window with HTML email. We (and Google, and hopefully everybody else providing mail readers) put a ton of work into sanitizing HTML before rendering it in the preview pane. This makes mail display a delicate balance between safety and preserving the sender's intent. It's already a far from trivial problem, and is one of the hundred or so non-obvious reasons why making a mail client isn't easy. What's nice about what they've done here is that they've required an additional (but now standard) level of authentication for the senders who want to include this richer, more actionable content. And they haven't hardwired this into Google Plus or some other walled garden. That's welcome, IMO.
  - m_eiman 13y ago
    Has there been any effort to create a standard subset of HTML that is safe for email? Seems like a problem worth solving once for everybody.
    - dmbaggett 13y ago
      Not that I know of, and in fact real-live HTML emails often contain complete gibberish (made-up tags, etc.) that doesn't even validate; we have a bunch of fix-up rules for this stuff. CSS is a complicating factor as well: some CSS is unsafe and must be stripped, which requires a real (error-tolerant) CSS parser to go along with your real HTML parser. And identifying remote images: you'd think that was easy right? But do you know how many ways there are to reference a .png image in HTML and CSS? At one point Facebook emails were even hiding web bugs in BGSOUND tags -- sneaky!
      - m_eiman 13y ago
        Huh. I would think that the only ones benefiting from the current state of affairs are scammers and spammers, strange that the big players haven't gotten together and done something about it.
    - BrianEatWorld 13y ago
      When I got dropped into crafting newsletters, I made the mistake of not looking into what different clients support only to find that my beautiful CSS buttons and the majority of the formatting was completely useless. I agree a standard set of HTML and CSS for email would be a huge benefit. It was only afterwards that I started noticing most beautiful emails are just sliced images displayed within tables. Thats right, tables.
- JoeKM 13y ago
  > Google have a bad track record in implementing things and then abandoning them for one. Google Reader drama isn't ever going away on HN, is it? The loud minority keep bringing it up regardless of what innovative products Google develops. > I want my email to be a consistent experience - not to get some different behavior if I access through a certain device. One decade ago most clients poorly supported HTML email, if at all. It was an inconsistent experience. Understandably it was new technology, so most of us patiently waited until the standard was adopted by email clients. Same thing here.
bentcorner 13y ago
It's all Fire and Motion. Google wants this to gain traction so that competing email clients spend cycles gaining feature parity. And for what? Make clicking a link easier?
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > It's all Fire and Motion. Google wants this to gain traction so that competing email clients spend cycles gaining feature parity. And for what? Make clicking a link easier? Actually, its to make machine-parsing of meaning easier so that information can be extracted from email and presented through other UIs (particularly, Google Search and Google Now.) Surfacing and facilitating responses to calls-to-action in the Gmail UI is important, but the big motivation is, I think, found in the two pages in the "Cross Google Experience" section of the documentation for the Schemas in Gmail feature [1][2]. [1] Answers in Google Search: https://developers.google.com/gmail/schemas/google-search https://developers.google.com/gmail/schemas/google-search [2] Google Now: https://developers.google.com/gmail/schemas/google-now https://developers.google.com/gmail/schemas/google-now
- Maxious 13y ago
  For those who haven't read it before: Fire and Motion http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html
calinet6 13y ago
How did I miss that Inky existed? Thanks for the link. Good marketing bit there ;)
TkTech 13y ago
I tried Inky after following your link. I signed up, added an account, let it sync up and played with it. I then went to settings and deleted my account and quit Inky. I noticed my computer running hot a few hours later and it turned out "inkycore" had been running with 100% in the background the entire time.
- dmbaggett 13y ago
  Please report that via feedback@inky.com with as much detail as you can; we'll send you info on how to grab the logs.

diffsir 13y ago

I read your blog all the time, this is the best post!!!11 We at cheap-online-discount-meds.info want to thank by giving you and your visitors 10% off just use the coupon code SPAM.

planetjones 13y ago

I don't think the reactions are strange at all. Google have a bad track record in implementing things and then abandoning them for one. I want my email to be a consistent experience - not to get some different behavior if I access through a certain device. Email and its simplicity was universal - I saw the same text on my phone, tablet, laptop and desktop. Will every mail sender who makes use of this, include the JSON and an alternative link to achieve the same result. I think this could get very inconsistent very quickly. Fragmenting email is not something I like the idea of. For Google Apps customers' internal mails I think this is useful. For the wider Internet I don't like it.

dmbaggett 13y ago
I see your point, but consistency of email display went out the window with HTML email. We (and Google, and hopefully everybody else providing mail readers) put a ton of work into sanitizing HTML before rendering it in the preview pane. This makes mail display a delicate balance between safety and preserving the sender's intent. It's already a far from trivial problem, and is one of the hundred or so non-obvious reasons why making a mail client isn't easy. What's nice about what they've done here is that they've required an additional (but now standard) level of authentication for the senders who want to include this richer, more actionable content. And they haven't hardwired this into Google Plus or some other walled garden. That's welcome, IMO.
- m_eiman 13y ago
  Has there been any effort to create a standard subset of HTML that is safe for email? Seems like a problem worth solving once for everybody.
  - dmbaggett 13y ago
    Not that I know of, and in fact real-live HTML emails often contain complete gibberish (made-up tags, etc.) that doesn't even validate; we have a bunch of fix-up rules for this stuff. CSS is a complicating factor as well: some CSS is unsafe and must be stripped, which requires a real (error-tolerant) CSS parser to go along with your real HTML parser. And identifying remote images: you'd think that was easy right? But do you know how many ways there are to reference a .png image in HTML and CSS? At one point Facebook emails were even hiding web bugs in BGSOUND tags -- sneaky!
    - m_eiman 13y ago
      Huh. I would think that the only ones benefiting from the current state of affairs are scammers and spammers, strange that the big players haven't gotten together and done something about it.
  - BrianEatWorld 13y ago
    When I got dropped into crafting newsletters, I made the mistake of not looking into what different clients support only to find that my beautiful CSS buttons and the majority of the formatting was completely useless. I agree a standard set of HTML and CSS for email would be a huge benefit. It was only afterwards that I started noticing most beautiful emails are just sliced images displayed within tables. Thats right, tables.
JoeKM 13y ago
> Google have a bad track record in implementing things and then abandoning them for one. Google Reader drama isn't ever going away on HN, is it? The loud minority keep bringing it up regardless of what innovative products Google develops. > I want my email to be a consistent experience - not to get some different behavior if I access through a certain device. One decade ago most clients poorly supported HTML email, if at all. It was an inconsistent experience. Understandably it was new technology, so most of us patiently waited until the standard was adopted by email clients. Same thing here.

bentcorner 13y ago

It's all Fire and Motion. Google wants this to gain traction so that competing email clients spend cycles gaining feature parity. And for what? Make clicking a link easier?

dragonwriter 13y ago
> It's all Fire and Motion. Google wants this to gain traction so that competing email clients spend cycles gaining feature parity. And for what? Make clicking a link easier? Actually, its to make machine-parsing of meaning easier so that information can be extracted from email and presented through other UIs (particularly, Google Search and Google Now.) Surfacing and facilitating responses to calls-to-action in the Gmail UI is important, but the big motivation is, I think, found in the two pages in the "Cross Google Experience" section of the documentation for the Schemas in Gmail feature [1][2]. [1] Answers in Google Search: https://developers.google.com/gmail/schemas/google-search https://developers.google.com/gmail/schemas/google-search [2] Google Now: https://developers.google.com/gmail/schemas/google-now https://developers.google.com/gmail/schemas/google-now
Maxious 13y ago
For those who haven't read it before: Fire and Motion http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html

calinet6 13y ago

How did I miss that Inky existed? Thanks for the link. Good marketing bit there ;)

TkTech 13y ago

I tried Inky after following your link. I signed up, added an account, let it sync up and played with it. I then went to settings and deleted my account and quit Inky. I noticed my computer running hot a few hours later and it turned out "inkycore" had been running with 100% in the background the entire time.

dmbaggett 13y ago
Please report that via feedback@inky.com with as much detail as you can; we'll send you info on how to grab the logs.