On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 11:11 AM, Tim Climis <tim.cli...@gmail.com> wrote: > > 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.
Ya I shouldn't have said "there aren't any", but I was hoping someone would comment with the name of one that doesn't. No one has yet... Not even you. What's "TA-ships"? Do many of your graduate students subscribe to this mailing list? My original question was never intended to target the general public, only the people on this mailing list. The oldest email system that I can think of that might be in use and might not be able to support basic HTML is something based on Novell Groupwise, but I'd like to know something definitive. > 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. What do you use? > > 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. Basic stuff should work fine... bold, italic, monospace font, block quotes. We have smart people in this community. If people are using a problematic email client, they'll know it. Besides that, most emails are HTML formatted. If they have problems with HTML in a mailing list, they'll also have problems elsewhere. > > 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) What counts as images, anyway. If embedded, wouldn't that be an attachment? "No attachments allowed." is a rule I agree with. I can see how that's a problem, though. While I suspect it's easy to flip a switch and allow HTML, it may be a much different thing to weed out embedded images that are encoded differently than regular attachments. I can understand that not all email clients have the ability to block images (<img> tags). So I can see that as a potential problem, but I do think that people in the community would <i>do the right thing</i> and correct others when they don't. > > 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. I asked this question to begin with because I thought that a lot about it might have been decided "back in the day". I just wanted a new discussion, and a new decision if it was called for. > 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. You're right, but I still say it would be nice to be able to do things like this. However, I'm learning that I'm alone in that opinion. Besides that, you're making part of my argument for me. The phrase "we've all" acknowledges the web-savvy group I'm talking about rather than the general public. > > ---Tim -- Ghodmode http://www.ghodmode.com/blog ______________________________________________________________________ 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/
