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Comment by pwdisswordfishz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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