I know this is a minority view, but...
Sending pages of HTML by email is a waste of resources (electricity, bandwidth etc), because HTML pages are many times larger than plain text. The more data is sent over the net, the higher its carbon emissions and overall environmental footprint. Please consider sending your emails as plain text, with a link at the top to an HTML version on your website, for those who want to see it.
I sold out on resisting html email after my coworkers couldn't click my links because they were longer than 72 characters.
And sometimes it's better to send an html email with an embedded plot and description in it than to send a docx attachment.
I think trying to keep the content simple is a good goal, its just some messages may need something richer than plain text.
Down with HTML email
@alienghic
> coworkers couldn't click my links because they were longer than 72 characters.
1) Why not? 2) Why were the links you were sending so long? 3) I'm certain there's a better way to address this than by sending all email wrapped in digital polystyrene.
> better to send an html email ... than to send a docx attachment
... or as I said, send a link to an HTML document (or a .pdf or whatever) on the web, where they belong.
re: Down with HTML email
They're so long because its links to things like https://examplehost/~user/project-name/experiment-name/component-name/file-name.data
with long piles of metadata in the all of the names. (& that example is already 85 characters)
Things get ugly when you're like condition a on, condition b off, in background z.
re: Down with HTML email
@alienghic
Ok, but I'm still confused about why the URL length is a problem. How and why did it stop people clicking on them?
re: Down with HTML email
Somewhere there's a spec to say wrap plain text at 72 or 78 characters.
There's supposed to be a line continuation character but I frequently got complaints off my links not working. And the people I was emailing have no understanding of URL syntax so didn't realize they should paste the extra bit at the end
Right now its probably more important to try fighting attachments than HTML email
Shipping around 60mb power pointsas base64 encoded attachments is so much worse than html email.
Though my boss loves the user experience of having documents as attachments and I'm not sure I can ever break her of that habit
re: Down with HTML email
@alienghic
> Somewhere there's a spec to say wrap plain text at 72 or 78 characters.
Ah, OK. Isn't that just an outdated UX suggestion for email clients though?
> Shipping around 60mb power pointsas base64 encoded attachments is so much worse than html email.
This is a bit like saying methane emissions from agriculture are are so much worse than fossil fuels from transport. It's true (at least in this coutry), but it doesn't mean it's not important to address both.
re: Down with HTML email
Ultimately I think there's times when the expressive power of lists, tables (for tabular data), block quotes, links, bold, italics and maybe even headings are needed to communicate more effectively.
There's some restricted subset of HTML some blog software will let people post in and I think there's a time and place for that.
I don't like it when the sender system choose their own fonts or font sizes as an accessibility issue for old eyes, and I think marketings love of fancy columns is a problem. I don't think my email should look like a clipped out magazine ad.
re: Down with HTML email
@alienghic
> there's times when the expressive power of lists, tables (for tabular data), block quotes, links, bold, italics and maybe even headings are needed to communicate more effectively.
For that, we have the web. But crucially, it's a pull medium. People only cause a copy of web page to be sent across the net if they request one. The objection lurking under all this seems to be that this freedom of choice is inconvenient to people in the business of persuasion.
re: Down with HTML email
@strypey @alienghic you don't need to send HTML if clients can render Markdown (or, better, asciidoc). The problem isn't formatted text, it is the HTML tag soup.
