On 2012-11-24, Derek Martin <inva...@pizzashack.org> wrote: > > Yeah, I said exactly that in another message. Now generate HTML > mail with Mutt. Plus you still get a lot of folks -- many of whom > use GUI clents -- who complain about HTML mail for any number of > reasons. And at least a few of them are legitimately arguable > concerns. A good > start: > > http://www.georgedillon.com/web/html_email_is_evil.shtml
6/7 of those are good reasons to condemn HTML e-mail with todays tools in a hypothetical scenario where tools cannot improve. (The bandwidth waste claim is silly and can be disregarded in these days of Youtube streaming and a diminishing dial-up community). As for the other 6 reasons, these are /all/ a result of poor engineering and implementation faults. Just because a link points to some dodgey flash garbage with flash cookies doesn't mean the browser should execute it. In principle, none of this rationale is a worthy cause to condemn HTML in the body of an e-mail message. People fail to produce quality tools. There's something to be said for dangerous and unnecessary features being excluded from a language to promote the quality tools used for the job -- but this does not entail abandoning the /whole/ language. Take a basic and fundamental part of it, call it safe-HTML, minimal-HTML, or email-HTML, and use a subset of the whole language. HTML authors often use silly features in silly ways, on the web or elsewhere. Despite conforming to a standard, they have little expectation for serious results that render the same on all browsers.
