[ale] CSS And HTML mail

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Thu, 2007-06-28 at 11:17 -0400, James Sumners wrote:

> To be honest, I hardly ever read your mails to the list simply because
> they are HTML formatted. The small, fixed-width, quotes and GIANT bold
> signature juxtaposed against your somewhat normal reply text, make it
> very annoying to read. It's also jarring to go from reading plain old
> ASCII emails, to reading an HTML email, and then back to ASCII. I'll
> admit, it is one of the best, and by that I mean least annoying, uses
> of HTML email I have seen. 


Part of the reason that I stopped using plain-text e-mails is that it is
a royal pain to try to get HTML mail composing enabled for *only* the
messages/accounts that you need them enabled for, and to be able to
change those settings every nine weeks (which is a requirement for the
school that I go to---well, the HTML mail, that is.  Unicode isn't
required, because that environment uses one of the borked ISO
encodings).

This massive undertaking every nine weeks prompted me to rethink my own
position on HTML mail.  Back when X was expensive to run and GUI
applications were not quite as good as what they could have been, I used
things like Pine to read my e-mail, and so receiving HTML mail never
bothered me (since it was rendered pretty close to what it was supposed
to be rendered like), though Pine's support for reading HTML has been
plagued by security issues.  IIRC, it was improperly written mailers
like this that gave HTML mail its reputation for being unsafe, not to
mention mailers that permitted silly things like JavaScript or (even
worse) VBScript to execute within the context of a mail message, which
should simply never happen.

In any case, HTML mail was quite inconvenient to read then.  And it can
be a pain even now, though there are many things which are just plain
easier with HTML mail.  I could never, though, bring myself to use HTML
mail like the people at school do.  Even the supposed "IT" teachers seem
to believe that strange color combinations and the like are acceptable,
and I don't get it.  The point of HTML mail, really, is to make a
message more readable---not less---and using neon colors helps nothing
(particularly when the HTML mail doesn't set a background color:  if the
message text is set to white, but the user's background is set to white,
then it simply isn't going to display).

My thoughts on HTML mail are that people who don't know how to use it
ought to stick with plain text, which they might think is pretty ugly
but on the whole it will never fail them.  At least they can't use neon
pink in plain text messages.  Neon green is even worse.  But, when I
rethought about it, I came to the conclusion that it can be useful to
have messages that aren't limited to 72 characters on a line, have
support for formatting instructions, can be centered or have block
quotes or links or whatever.  It can be quite nice to be able to just
click something in a mail message and have it open up in a browser
window (assuming that the person reading the message verifies the link
first; of course, most end-users don't do that, either).

I also think that we're going to see more and more HTML mail in the
future, and I think that users (incorrectly) associate nice-looking HTML
mail for professionalism.  Frankly, I have always been of the mind-set
that appearances should not matter---no matter the context---but there
are many people who are far more opinionated on the subject than I.
When I was recruiting, I found that I actually got more of a response to
my messages when they were formatted using HTML.  I did nothing
different for the content, just formatted it using HTML.  I thought that
was strange at the time, but it does seem to have an impact.  HTML
carries quite a bad reputation in Internet mail messages, but all in
all, any mail by a decent mailer should also have a text/plain that can
be preferred over the HTML... and Evolution actually does a halfway
decent job of creating the text/plain portion of an e-mail message.
Now, if only Evolution had the ability to actually (easily) "tag"
accounts that you wanted a certain set of settings applied to, that
would be awesome.  Right now, it does some things by recipient, but
that's not anywhere near flexible enough to use.

I do try to at least stay away from using Unicode on this list, though,
as I have been told that some mailers have trouble reading them.
Hopefully, in another year or two, all of the mailers will either learn
how to render Unicode characters, or at the very least transliterate
them so that they aren't an issue any longer.  IIRC, the standards
permit transliteration if it is necessary to display a message without
borking a terminal.

    --- Mike

--
Michael B. Trausch
           michael.trausch at gmail.com
Phone: (404) 592-5746
                          Jabber IM:
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Demand Freedom!  Use open and free protocols, standards, and software!
Support free speech---it is the most valuable freedom we have!
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