The problems with HTML email originate in the days when clients like Outlook would produce horrendous, non-responsive HTML that were basically entire embedded web pages; the idea that the sender should be able to dictate the font of an email is a bit ridiculous, not to mention the layout, and the result was often broken depending on the email client.
Emails aren't web pages, but they do benefit from formatting (bold, italics, links, paragraphs), all of which lead to better emails overall. After all, everyone has their plaintext style (asterisks for emphasis, or maybe underscores, etc.) and HTML formalizes those conventions in a way that has been standard for decades and even centuries if you consider typesetting in general.
I like the idea of HTML email better than I like the implementation. I'd love to see a minimal HTML subset that only included formatting (including paragraphs, indentation and blockquoting), images and links. No tables, no box model, fonts or styling. We can keep full HTML for fancy marketing emails, but letter-form email should be simple and impossible to abuse.
These days, of course, most email is HTML simply because that's the default for almost all email apps (Gmail, Outlook, Spark, Polymail, etc.). It's not true that only marketing emails use HTML, as the author claims.
This is counter to my own experience. I am using (plain text) email since 27 years. Including inline quoting and avoiding top posting at all costs.
People used bold (not sure how to render a '*' in HN) /italic/ and _underscore_ consistently on lists, newsgroups and -- rarely, as seldomly needed -- in private correspondence.
I learned how to do this by example. Everyone being very disciplined about this in the 90's still.
This started deteriorating rapidly in the wake of eternal September [1] and Outlook becoming the standard client in the corporate world, using HTML as default.
Personally I blame Outlook for HTML email hell foremost.
It is very simple to display plain text email, omitting aforementioned formatters and applying them. The same goes for displaying in a proportional font (detecting intended indentations from the original and replicating them with tabs, on the fly).
Using such formatters is just another (and not even alien) form of inline markup. Actually the very one that inspired markdown, ReST, etc.
The only reason people use HTML email is that it's the default. Not that it's better in any way.
>We can keep full HTML for fancy marketing emails, but letter-form email should be simple and impossible to abuse.
You had me convinced up until this part. Marketing emails are, IME, the most prone to being abusive. If anyone deserves to have their fingers rapped every time they try to get fancy with HTML mail, it's the scumbags that send marketing email (which is by definition spam).
Emails aren't web pages, but they do benefit from formatting (bold, italics, links, paragraphs), all of which lead to better emails overall. After all, everyone has their plaintext style (asterisks for emphasis, or maybe underscores, etc.) and HTML formalizes those conventions in a way that has been standard for decades and even centuries if you consider typesetting in general.
I like the idea of HTML email better than I like the implementation. I'd love to see a minimal HTML subset that only included formatting (including paragraphs, indentation and blockquoting), images and links. No tables, no box model, fonts or styling. We can keep full HTML for fancy marketing emails, but letter-form email should be simple and impossible to abuse.
These days, of course, most email is HTML simply because that's the default for almost all email apps (Gmail, Outlook, Spark, Polymail, etc.). It's not true that only marketing emails use HTML, as the author claims.