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Comment by B5geek | Hacker News Reader

Html in email is bad.evil.wrong.stupid. When will these people get it?

Best Practices for all HTML messages is to also send a Text-Only version. Have you configured your client to prefer the text version?

Nearly all marketing messages that I receive are HTML only, not multipart. In fact, this is a problem that seems almost as if it is specific to marketing spam; ordinary people who send HTML mail seem to use MUAs that sensibly send a plain text part as well. But whatever tools marketers use to send their "newsletters" seem to be ignorant of best practices, or they just don't care about the small market segment of people who don't read HTML mail.

This is not a complaint. I don't care to read what they're sending me anyway, and the wall of visual garbage that greets me when I open one of those messages has trained me to reflexively hit delete and move on.

I just checked the most recent 5 newsletter or marketing messages in my inbox and all of they were all multipart with a text version. Every message my company sends has a text version -- I think some email service providers generate one automatically whether you want it or not.

shrug Maybe it depends on the type of stuff you're getting.

I like plain text as well but I dislike the fact that it looks so ugly. Why do we need to insert line break at 72 (or something) characters? Can't we wrap text emails?

There's an RFC that nobody uses for rich-text e-mails.

[edit] found it! http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1523

Perhaps I need to think about what I don't like about html-formatted emails. I can't really put my finger on anything. I am not against html when I think about it. It just feels like it is not the right tool for the job. (I know I am doing a pretty poor job at explaining myself. Sorry!)

I don't like them either, for the exact same reason!

Thunderbird wraps plaintext emails by default.

I'm surprised you can access hacker news back there in 1994.

Still using mutt, huh?

He's probably still using email for communication and not free mass media content delivery.

And how HTML in emails is getting in the way of communication?

Most people use GMail as their email client, so even when they read plain text emails what they actually see is HTML email. The only difference is typeface, but you can configure that.

HTML as a technology to render plain text obviously isn't getting in the way, because it's plain text. All the features of HTML beyond that get in the way by obscuring the plain text and the information plain text conveys. In my mind, email, or text communication, is not about presentation but is about textual content. If you want to deliver media or style or a visual presentation, it's just not email. I would strongly prefer if it was a plain url or safe attachment in format that doesn't allow any kind of scripting.

> All the features of HTML beyond that get in the way by obscuring the plain text and the information plain text conveys.

I don't see any obfuscation happening in the emails shown in this article. Rather, the article's suggestions give even more emphasis to the text.

"Grr HTML bad" is not a very defensible position.

> In my mind, email, or text communication, is not about presentation but is about textual content.

It was recognized before email even existed that presentation is fundamental to textual communication. Cf. the works of Jan Tschichold and Marshall McLuhan to pick two arbitrary examples.

I agree that typography, a tiny subset of HTML, is important, and that the emails in article look good and are very readable. However, like with most things, such as scripting and root access, there are security and eyecare concerns involved. And so, I think it is still best that only I am allowed to pick the font and spacing that are comfortable for me, and the sender can only send me plain text information.

Communication can include colors, images and videos. I don't see any reason why these can't or shouldn't be available inside an email.

The more ways you have to convey the information, the better, imo.

Why do you think so many books don't use colors, images and other ways to convey information? Why do you think comments on this website don't let you use colors, images and videos?

Colors and images were used long before text to convey information. Then they were used together with text (see first books). Using just text without colors and images is a relatively new invention caused by technical limitations, and it didn't last long.

And let me guess, a letter with a sketch embedded, or perhaps some calligraphy or flourishes isn't really a letter, right?

Mutt can render html emails via w3m or lynx. Any well-designed html email should degrade gracefully to either of those clients.

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