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lysace

HTML email was a mistake. I believe the guilty party is Microsoft with Outlook 97.

https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-outlook/97

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In my recollection it was Netscape, this appers to confirm it:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2017/09/html-email-was-that-your-fa...

From my recollection Microsoft pushed their own RTF like rich mail format hard for a while and did support HTML only reluctantly.

They still support HTML only reluctantly.

Thanks for linking to a picture of testicles.

That 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.

Having 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.

Oh 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.

Well, 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.

> 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/

Well, 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.

And 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/

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.

> 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.

In my world, MMS never was popular. Where do you live?

Live in Spain, but grew up in Sweden, am around 30 years old. In late 90s/early 2000s, MMS was wildly popular among my peers.

Huh. OK, then. Interesting datapoint. It was a PITA flop in the UK -- it occasionally kicked in when an SMS went over length or you added a smiley, and cost you 10x as much to send.

Some 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.

I wonder if, in the pipe dream that email were magically replaced by something more modern, we'd use something like markdown instead.

How would that help here?

I use a email client without HTML email. I have not had problems with this.

You are not the only one and whenever there is no text/plain there is webdump:

https://codemadness.org/git/webdump/file/README.html

HTML 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.

I think Apple is the guilty party of starting it first with OpenDoc based CyberDog released in 1996.

Can we really blame OpenDoc for anything, though? It seems more sad than impactful, honestly.

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.

OpenDoc 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

I 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.

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