HTML email was such a tragic mistake.
I think the whole mess could have been averted if Markdown had been invented about twenty years earlier.
I think the whole mess could have been averted if Markdown had been invented about twenty years earlier.
You're really rolling a dice on what may work, even if it's valid HTML
The real issue is bespoke rendering engines instead of just using a rule of "everything the current browser can do, but no js".
It's easy and fairly intuitive to write (most of it, anyway).
It's easy to read in different formats and ways (HTML, plain text).
It doesn't add highly complex rendering issues. I've worked on two email clients in the last ten years, and the amount of weird HTML some send is just bonkers. Is <div style="position:fixed"> in emails crazy? Yes. Do you need to deal with it? Also yes.
Mandate markdown and MTAs and marketing departments will send you markdown only made of pure HTML.
``` #include <stdio.h>
int main() { /* my software in ASM */ __asm__ ( [...<insert your assembly code lines here>...] );
return 0 ;And you are pretty sure this is pretty much what would happen with markdown in emails if it ended up being mandatory. You would end up with emails entirely made of html.
Images can just be links and it would be a setting on the client to open it or not. Like what the Lagrange gemini browser does: it lets you click on a link to an image to load it.
I would argue that even tables are superfluous, you could put a csv file in a block quote and people's clients could just render it optionnally.
You can’t make elaborate layouts with Markdown. You can’t obfuscate text in images or make hidden links or inject JavaScript.
Just some basic text styling (headers, italics, bold type), and images. Everything necessary to make a well-formatted message — which is what email is supposed to be — instead of mailing a web page, in a medium that hasn’t been refined for quality and safety like modern HTML+CSS has.