On Wednesday, July 20, 2011 7:59:45 am Ghodmode wrote: > There aren't any contemporary email applications that can't handle HTML. Is > anyone using one?
This obviously isn't true, as we've heard from at least two people. I work for a major American university, and the email system all our graduate students with TA-ships are forced to use does not support HTML emails, so there's a whole population that's not using HTML mail. There are also email readers that handle plain text much better than others. For example, I'm assuming the replies to this are using * for bold and _ for underlines. But I'm seeing them in actual bold and underlined. And I'm seeing quotes in green, but I'm pretty sure no one's actually formatting them that way themselves. > > Use of HTML and CSS enhances readability and semantics, which can in > turn enhance accessibility. We know this... it's what we discuss > continually in this community. Given the sad state of HTML rendering in emails (MS Outlook 2010 still uses Word as its renderer, for crying out loud), I'm not convinced that HTML email would actually qualify as "more accessible" than plain text. In a browser, certainly. But email readers are not browsers - they barely even rate as high as the proverbial red-headed stepchild of the browser family. > The overhead added by HTML is insignificant by any modern standards. On this, I agree (provided there aren't giant background images and signature avitars -- which, personally, I get a lot of) > So, why can't we use HTML... especially in this community. In this community, and other web-related communities, HTML email was a particular issue, because (at least back in the day -- probably not so true anymore), typing HTML into an HTML email resulted in HTML being displayed. Not the HTML code that we all actually want to see, but the table, or green text, or what-have-you that the HTML would produce. As you can imagine, that could be particularly problematic. As for highlighting blocks of code -- we've all been doing this long enough to recognize CSS when we see it. It doesn't need a background color. And besides, it's almost always more useful to just give a link to the site and some line numbers from the code. ---Tim ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [css-d@lists.css-discuss.org] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
