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Comment by tehabe | Hacker News Reader

I'm always annoyed by Outlook's HTML, I remember when it set Calibri as font and the fall back was "sans-serif" which would not really work.

It really made me wish that HTML in emails would vanish, just vanish and never come back again. Sadly this won't happening.

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I'd be down with them either vanishing, or at the very least being compliant with a standard html5 spec. The in between state they're in now is the worst of both worlds.

Which HTML 5 spec is that exactly?

HTML 5 is a "living standard", which is a horrible idea for documents that might be archived for 10 years, like email.

Note, I'm not condoning the status quo, but let's think about what we actually want here.

A proper browser can display all HTML documents crated like, ever, if you can live with some imperfections that are there to deal with improper browsers in the first place.

I mean, I get your point, and it makes sense, and for a similar reason we didn't get WebSQL. But I think HTML is special in this regard. Everyone just accepted the complexity of dealing with all sorts of documents.

HTML 5 maintains backwards compatibility. HTML from 20 years ago still works today.

I would be happy if there was a subset of HTML for email. Look at the HTML Gmail produces, which is essentially just <div> or <p> in the default mode and uses <span> for changes of formating and <blockquote> for replies. This would work for propably 90 to 99% of all hand written emails in Outlook or any other email client.

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