Tables no longer needed for HTML email
fullystacked.net
fullystacked.net
Just because there's some marginal benefit to AMP for Email, it doesn't make it good.
I regularly encounter HTML email that has an empty text/plain part, or an error message, or a converted text version of an email that's missing the most critical information. For instance, I often get "confirm your registration/email" emails whose text/plain parts leave out the confirmation link or confirmation code.
It was however a highly reliable and simple indicator of spam and junk. IF format = HTML then isJunk.
Nowadays with the mindless guzzling at the web junk firehose html email is now ubiquitous and consistent in rendering it seems. But With no improvement in copy or relevance. But it does have bling!
Even in this letter from 1950, there is:
- bold type - underlining - different text alignments - a table
It's done shittily, but it's done. It also took forever, which is why they had to fill large rooms with typists.
Underlining will use much more space with dashes. So much so that the spacing adds to the emphasis. And you can't use it in running text. Underlining with underscores OTOH is hard to read and has less emphasis than normal underlining.
Alignment can be done more or less correctly, but it is a hassle. And it requires a monospace font, which isn't great for readability.
Tables also require a monospace font, and are also a hassle, and you'll still end up with a hard to read pseudo-table.
And that's just the mentioned limitations. You also can't include charts, formulas, screenshots, links, superscript, subscript, italics, without severe limitations.
If email were still limited to plain text + attachments, I think a lot of them would be "please see attached Word file".
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.
The global average is mostly dictated by whatever India and China use which is low budget androids. But for sending emails, you are often sending to specific countries only.
Also, much like Windows on the desktop, the email side of things is going to be skewed by business use; I would wager (without the data to hand) that iPhone and iOS is dominant in business, due to the perceived notion of better security and similarity across devices. Though the majority of mailflow globally is spam, or at least greymail, business email outweighs personal use of email. It’s also likely that the majority of Android handsets are merely used as dumb-phones based on engagement. Based on app metrics, iPhone users are more likely to use their device. That is why iOS mail in particular has the market share.
Doesn't mean he wasn't right.
iOS is majority in a handful of countries, mostly small very rich countries (Monaco, Norway, Denmark), North America and Japan (probably Australia too by a smallmargin) and North Korea.
In UK to situation is 53% Android, 46% iOS, which is kinda strange for UK, the country of London, the temple of global finance. Being majority in UK is like having 80% of the market in Germany.
> Based on app metrics, iPhone users are more likely to use their device.
that's some spurious correlation there!
of course app metrics say that, Android users can use a web app! They aren't trained to only use whatever Apple wants them to use.
Wait, what? Really?
Although I'd personally expect Samsung to be huge there as it's their home market.
I have to agree overall though. Here in Spain most people use Android and midrange ones at that. If you see an iphone it's usually ancient or an SE or simply in the hands of a tourist.
For a normal Spanish wage an iphone is just too expensive. And the SE with its 7 year old design just not interesting enough for the huge price they still cost here.
As of January 2023, the percentage of mobile users who use iOS-based mobile devices is higher in North Korea than in any other country in the world.
This trend is somewhat surprising, as iPhones are not legally available in North Korea. However, iPhones are considered much more secure than the phones which are legally available in the country, which consumers believe are often monitored by the totalitarian government of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. In light of this concern, a robust underground market for iPhones has emerged.
I will, however, point out that from the statistics I've seen Apple has roughly half of the market share, with Samsung at about 30% - a pretty decent lead.
Doesn't mean he was either. It's well known that Android has the global market share. The point I made was that iOS is more popular with businesses, which explains why the iOS mail client see higher use than any other platform.
> Being majority in UK is like having 80% of the market in Germany.
Germany has a higher population by 16M people, just under twice the population of London. The average gross salary is $52K (€47K) in Germany vs $32K in the UK ($40K or £32K in London). German GDP is considerably higher too. So no.
> of course app metrics say that, Android users can use a web app!
But, outside of tech circles, do they? Anecdotally, I know a few android users and they tend to use exactly 4 apps regularly; Chrome, Insta, Facebook and WhatsApp. Even the technologists don't bother with web apps. So based on that and the OP's attestation, no-one uses web apps.
but the global US market is 55/45 not really a huge difference
> The global average is mostly dictated by whatever India and China use
Not really. It also depends on market penetration, in the west is around >90%, In China is below 50%, in India ~60%.
OTOH the fact that billion people can effectively communicate using cheap Android phones, means that expensive iPhones are not actually a necessity, but a luxury, we could get rid of them and still be able to do what we already do everyday. I
For most other clients, not only does the user need to open the email but they also need to allow images to be shown for that sender. This will artificially deflate both open rates and market share.
How does this privacy-preserving work, where the leak is the specific resource being read?
Basically all the server learns is that the email address went to an Apple Mail client.
That's what's going away: Outlook on Windows moves to the Chromium-lineage MS Edge web layout.
I idly wonder about legacy DIME (binary multipart MIME encoding from 20th Century Office products), but it's easier to run entire legacy systems inside a web render these days.
One of the Word layout engines really boosted Microsoft's dynamic web browser implementation in the early days; they had this compact, fast thing they could use already. IE 4.0 era.
Glad you came around. This is probably the correct decision.
Markdown syntax takes a bit of time to learn, but with images, tables, limited HTML tags, I think it would suffice for 99% of use cases and remove the need for all the sanitization that current clients do.
But sadly too many folks use mail clients that render and compose HTML, or worse, and there would be no real incentive to switch. It might be a function of the sending client to send the prerendered HTML along with the plain text markdown part.
People have suggested Markdown for email quite a few times. It’s a total non-starter, absolutely no chance of anyone doing it in the next few years at least (and I strongly doubt Markdown in any form will ever make it in like that).
What if I need to share tabular data? An annotated image with discussion straight after it? Equations? People will have you make everything an attachment but that is much worse in terms of context switching. Absorbing new information is easier when the image is inline with text. Especially after it's been forwarded three times. We NEED formatted email, whether in the guise of a word document or HTML.
| Type | Host/Name | Value/Points to |
| ----- | ------------- | ------------------------------- |
| CNAME | s1._domainkey | s1._domainkey.example.com |
| CNAME | s2._domainkey | s2._domainkey.example.com |
| TXT | _dmarc | v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; adkim=s |
But I agree with you on context and having data visible right there in the email. It's often the case that people forgo using email as the functional communication technology it is and settles with attachments only and the canned byline.
I want to see full markdown, mermaid and the like in email.
2. It looks terrible on mobile: https://i.imgur.io/ovzaJDG_d.webp?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&f...
Edit: Realized arguing for CSS properties defeats my point on plaintext. You are right, plaintext is problematic.
Ironic
Also, it's awful for any serious editing
Also, add a bit of *formatting* in the cells, and all your plain readability stemming from tabular alignment is gone
Probably, NO.
For business things to share some table data use ascii preformatted tables. They look nice and clean!
Reference an image attached like [1] or [image-name.jpg] (see attached).
Or just attach pdf if needs to pass slides.
What we don't need is a formatted marketing crap!
Don't agree. Some people WANT formatted email (marketers). If you want tight control of layout, send me a PDF - that's what it's for.
Of course plaintext email does support images, it’s called MIME.
So we’re still many years away from being able to finally dump tables.
And there’s still Gmail, which is also a giant pain-in-the-arse with basic things like media queries.
Then of course there’s the real question, what the hell is the point anyways? 82% of emails are primarily opened on mobile now (and a huge chunk on dark mode). Yet, hilariously, you go to sites like reallygoodemails.com and you see mini-desktop websites that mostly nobody will ever see in that format.
Why waste developer hours building mini-websites for a medium that is fundamentally ephemeral?
I've had bosses that required their mail system (supported by me) to retain essentially all of their inbound and outbound email indefinitely. Many mobile devices seem to have merged email and messaging; messaging may be ephemeral, but email isn't the same as messaging.
I deplore HTML-formatted email anyway. The last time I had to generate HTML-formatted email, the main problem MUA was Microsoft Outlook; I didn't realize that the problem was that Outlook used Microsoft Word's HTML renderer (TIL). I've always hated HTML-formatted email anyway, so jumping through the various hoops to generate HTML email automatically was a real drag.
The article's focus on the wonders of AMP as a solution is scary. AMP is a Google-controlled technology, widely-despised. Making AMP the solution to HTML email looks like a way of tightening Goo's already-tight grip on email's throat.
[Edit] So now a properly-constructed HTML email becomes a multipart with a minimum of three parts: text/plain, HTML and AMP. I don't see this as a wonderful new world.
The big all-important thing is that the Microsoft Word styling is out. It hurts in _so_ many ways when making a mail to be sent via Mailchimp/Mandrill.
Tables is just the example which is easy to convey, something everybody understands. Explaining why a margin/padding/whatever working slightly differently in Microsoft Word (AKA Outlook) and gmail can ruin a few of your days is more difficult.
But probably anyone who has thought "I'll just insert this image here in this Word document, what is the worst that could happen" knows what I mean. Here's a "funny": https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/2glhbp/moving_a_pict...
Making an email that retains the styling in both gmail and outlook, even when the customer replies to it, can be a major endeavor. It sounds like that is changing. Thank God.
There's an open source project to fix it though: https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/
Together with an app to fix the scroll wheel and a calendar widget, working with MacOS becomes almost bearable.
I don't go low on ram often enough to notice anything, or the exemption still works.
Despite the headline, it really isn't the important part. The important thing is getting rid of the mso styling.
2. Imo, Grid is a much easier to read alternative to most uses of tables.
Back when tables were the only tool available for layout, professionals combined tables with 1x1 pixel transparent gifs which could be scaled to force cells to have a fixed size.
I guess you could argue that tables combined with spacer-gifs are reliable. But solution exists which are just as reliable, much easier to use, and better for accessibility.
> It is hard to track down where a style is coming from.
This is an orthogonal concern. If you don't like CSS inheritance and cascade, you can just use style attributes directly on elements. I believe Tailwind uses a similar approach through class attributes.
I'm getting fuck old...
(I like table layouts, now git off mah lawn ya green youngins.)
This doesn't change the fact that only a portion of Outlook users use the new version, so the "no longer needed" statement in the headline is a bit exaggerated.
But I want to point japanese plain text marketing emails. Those are marvels of unicode asciiart blocks, separators/lines and arrows. They even send HTML emails as text sometime, and the only HTML styling is selecting a font.
AMP seems a weird thing to talk about as something that helps. Even if you support AMP you still need to make the regular HTML content work so it’s just extra work to create, maintain and test. Why bother?
I don't care what this html will look like as long it's can be used without workarounds.
I think you meant your
Please take a moment to remove formatting and images from your own email signatures. It’s rarely useful and always clutter.
Thank you.
$ show cur -noshowproc
I decided on MH because I had a habit of subscribing to mailing lists, or at least being enrolled on them, without caring too much whether I read the messages. So I wanted a sort of NNTP-newsfeed-like way of splitting up all the mail into folders so that I could get work done while ignoring whatever was on those lists.
I believe I used procmail, piping everything that came in through ridiculous regexps and having MH sort them into mail folders, as it was wont to do. It was lovely, and I seem to recall always having a zero-size mail spool because even the unread stuff was going into a folder for later checking. I didn't use BIFF. Remember biff, not the VIC-20 user, but the mail notifier. I didn't need a mail notifier, because I always had mail. It was just neverending. MH helped me come to terms with that.
My highly customized MH environment was lost to the four winds when I left that regional ISP, and since I had no equivalent shell-based multi-user networked system in 1994, I didn't recreate MH and it fell by the wayside, for me, but probably not for Chris Siebenmann.
All I ever read is the plain text version anyway.
Having React/JSX for email templating (even if it was on top of MJML) is a great win for productivity.
All our front-end devs knew React, a couple knew Jinja, Pug or mustache. And every-time a team needed to add a new email template, their frontend devs needed to learn those again.
Instead they could just write email templates as they would write their regular components the way they do every day.
Glad to be validated on this!