At Sun, 02 Feb 03, Unidentified Flying Banana Alexander Hvostov, said: > I'm sure there are other reasons that make HTML inappropriate for email, > at least for the time being. Anyone care to comment? This was actually the subject of a recent thread on the mailing list for my local Linux User Group mailing list, and I posted a lengthy explanation of what I think is wrong with HTML e-mail. I've included the post here to provide a nice "HTML in e-mail is a Very Bad Thing (tm)" rant. I'm fairly new to this mailing list, so I apologize if this is inappropriate. > Alex. -- | Christopher +------------------------------------------------+ | A: No. | | Q: Should I include quotations after my reply? | +------------------------------------------------+
From: Christopher Cashell <topher@zyp.org> To: olug@olug.org Subject: Re: [olug] ASCII Ribbon Campaign Date: Sat, 28 Sep 2002 02:02:09 -0500 At Tue, 24 Sep 02, Unidentified Flying Banana Nick Walter, said: > I'll risk being flamed till I'm crisp . . . I'll try not to be too firey. . . > I completely understand and agree with "Respect for open standards" and also > "No M$ Word docs in e-mail". It's not just a matter of open standards, but access. Every e-mail client in the world can handle plain text e-mail. Many cannot view other formats. > I can't, however, quite agree with "No HTML/RTF in e-mail". Both HTML > and (theoretically) RTF are open formats that are well supported in a > variety of O/Ss. They are well supported within certain programs in a variety of OS's. That doesn't mean that every e-mail client is capable of reading them. Nor should it have to. > Using these formats is not contributing to anyone's evil monopoly or > excluding a Linux/*BSD user from reading the document properly. My primary e-mail client is mutt. It's a console based program which works best with plain ASCII text. It was designed to be an e-mail client, and nothing else, and it works amazingly well for that. Now, it can utilize external programs to view non-text attachments, such as HTML and RTF, but doing so is slow, cumbersome, and difficult. Additionally, trying to reply to HTML/RTF e-mail is very bothersome, particularly with accurate quoting. Many (most?) PDA e-mail programs have difficulties with HTML/RTF e-mail still, as well. > I myself send and receive quite a bit of HTML e-mail from the linux > desktop I sit in front of for 8 hours a day at work, and have > absolutely no problems reading it or sending it . . . That's good. I'm glad to hear it. But don't forget that your experience doesn't always match up to what other people are doing. Some people can't easily send or receive HTML e-mail. So far, I've concentrated on the fact that some people will be unable to read HTML/RTF e-mail. While this is an important fact, and in my opinion reason enough to not use HTML in e-mail, there are actually a number of other reasons. Not everyone is on some sort of broadband Internet connection yet. In fact, the vast majority of people aren't. Sending an e-mail as HTML will generally at least double the size of the e-mail, and frequently more. I've seen some HTML e-mails that were more than 5 times the size of their plain text equivalents. Sending an e-mail as both plain text and HTML will more than triple the size of an e-mail. For people with slow connections, this can be quite an inconvenience. Many people dislike HTML e-mail, even if they can read it fine. Reading HTML means that you have to deal with color and font changes, text size changes, links, tables, etc. This can be distracting at the best of times, and downright frustrating at the worst. Many people like to change the background color of their HTML e-mails, or change the text color. Few of them have any experience with Human Factors or Interface Design, and most end up making their content more difficult to read. Lastly, HTML is much harder to translate into braille or reading devices, making it more difficult for those with vision impairments to use (I'm familiar with this one because a good friend of mine is legally blind). I've set up my computer, and my e-mail client, in order to make reading e-mail as easy for me as possible. This only works when I'm allowed to specify my own colors, fonts, and styles, though. And don't forget that while it may look one way on your machine, it may look differently on mine. When you have to deal with as much e-mail as I do daily, you do everything you can to simplify it. Many people have noticed that the majority of Spam is sent as HTML e-mail, and that the majority of HTML e-mail is Spam. For this reason, many mailing lists and many people filter all HTML e-mail as spam, and trash it. In fact, I frequently do this myself, and I'm on numerous mailing lists which reject HTML e-mails. As was commented in the message that started this thread, HTML e-mail can have extremely nasty effects for people who read mailing lists in Digest mode. Digest mode is where all of the messages that are sent to a mailing list are packaged together, and then periodically (usually daily, weekly, etc) sent to the list digest subscriber. When HTML e-mails are included, you end up with a large text file sprinkled through with HTML that will be entirely unreadable for those trying to sort through the e-mail digest. HTML e-mail is also responsible for what I consider one of the worst things to happen to e-mail. . . it's breach in security. For years and years, it was common and accepted knowledge that there was absolutely no way you could be affected by any sort of virus simply by reading your e-mail. It was impossible. Couldn't be done. You had to execute a program first. That fact is no longer true. And not only that, but it's gotten worse. E-mail based viruses, utilizing HTML, JavaScript, VBScript, and holes in the HTML rendering engines required to view HTML e-mail have become among the fastest growing and most damaging virii. We've gone from a 100% safe medium of communication to opening some of the biggest security holes in the history of the Internet, simply to make e-mail more "pretty". Finally, I'll end with the most important reason. . . it's unnecessary. There is really no good reason to use HTML or RTF in E-mail. I've been sending and receiving e-mail for over 10 years now, and I've never encountered a situation where I absolutely had to send e-mail using HTML. The whole point of an e-mail is to distribute thoughts, ideas. . . content. Content is words, not flashy colors, blinking text, and italic or bold letters. If you have something that you simply *can't* send as plain text, I suggest either reconsidering what you're sending, or posting it as a web page (where HTML was meant to go) and e-mailing a link to it. I hope this hasn't come off as too rude or unfriendly, but this is something that has always annoyed me, along with other examples of poor netiquette such as poor quoting and trimming in e-mail replies, random attachments, etc. I'm not trying to be mean, but I wanted to explain reasonably fully why I feel HTML (and RTF) has no place in e-mail. For some alternate expressions of what I've said, please see some of the references I've included below. > Nick Walter References: [1] http://www.efn.no/html-bad.html [2] http://www.georgedillon.com/web/html_email_is_evil.shtml [3] http://www.webfoot.com/advice/email.top.html -- Christopher
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