River Brandon wrote:
On Jan 29, 2010, at 1:45 PM, John C. Welch wrote:
It's funny, how I, the person who is, from what I can tell,
ADVOCATING THE END OF EMAIL recoils in HORROR at the idea of
overcomplicating the composer to where you have to use STYLE
SHEETS.
actually, if i understand correctly, he's suggesting that the
composer has a pre-determined stylesheet, not that users create or
user stylesheets. whether it's such a terrible suggestion or not will
be easier to talk about if it's first understood. then we can talk
about the same thing.
Yes! Thank you for understanding.
John, the whole point is to keep the HTML composition features to a
minimum. Provide enough for users to convey the semantics of their
content, but not so much that they can go crazy with wild fonts,
colours, transitions, borders, and other unnecessary bells and whistles.
Think about the market for just a moment, and think about what such
users really need for composing mail. These are power users who read
and write significant amounts of e-mail. Such users want the ability to
quickly and easily communicate their message, without getting bogged
down in pixel perfect design issues. This is not an app for e-mail
marketers, who want the e-mail themed to match their corporate image and
style guides; or for kids who want to send colourful e-mails to their
friends.
For a power user, the kind of content that they are likely to be
interested in writing is:
* Quotes (including both for replies, and copied and pasted from other
sources)
* Bold and Italic for emphasis
* Links and e-mail addresses
* Bulleted and Numbered lists
* Preformatted text (e.g. code fragments)
* Headings
* Tables
* Emoticons
* Images (e.g. photos)
These features are easy to do in plain text, and many users including
myself, find that a whole lot quicker and easier than messing around
with HTML. The aim is to get the message across, not make things look
pretty.
However, I will admit that there are power users who prefer the look and
feel of HTML over the monotony of plain text. But these users are still
more interested in communicating their message than making things look
pretty. The features listed above can be provided with a few very
simple commands. These are the toolbar buttons that I think would be
appropriate for e-mail composition.
---
* Paragraph (default selection, <p>)
* Headings (3 heading levels should be sufficient, <h1> to <h3>)
* Preformatted text (<pre>)
* Block Quotation (<blockquote>)
* Ordered List (<ol> and <li>)
* Unordered List (<ul> and <li>)
* Table
- When editing a tables, the user should be able to specify
header cells and data cells
- Insert/delete rows and columns
- Merge cells
* Bold (<b>)
* Italic (<i>)
* Link (<a>)
* Emoticons
* Images
---
These commands should be suffient for the vast majority of communication
needs. To get your message across, there is very little reason for
specifying anything else beyond that. It's also very easy to provide a
nice clean and simple default, non-user-configurable [1], stylesheet for
those elements.
Most of those can also be easily translated into a plain text
alternative. I realise tables present a little bit of a challenge,
however. (It would be useful to investigate how other mail clients
handle that issue later)
[1] Note: If we provide a way for users to edit the email source
directly while composing, then users could mess with the stylesheet if
they really want to. But this is completely unnecessary for most users
using a WYSIWIG composer.
--
Lachlan Hunt - Opera Software
http://lachy.id.au/
http://www.opera.com/
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