HTML in e-mail is a bad idea ... Because HTML is for making web pages and plain text is for simple communications. If you're looking to create a web page or write a book, fine. But e-mail messages are not web pages or books. e-mail was designed for simple messaging. Anything else detracts, rather than adds to its core functionality. As Andy Rooney said, "E-mail is simple. Like the pencil, it just works." Well, e-mail is not simple -- and it doesn't always work -- when HTML is involved.
Because it encourages people to express themselves with fancy formatting rather than with carefully chosen words. Because it introduces compatibility problems with text-based clients like the hundreds of thousands of Pine users out there (see screenshot below). Because it can introduce security issues and trojan horses -- it's a gateway to danger as any Outlook user can tell you. HTML can include any number of scripts, dangerous links, controls, etc. Because it's being unfairly forced on the world by a single corporation (Microsoft). Because it takes a nice, short two-line e-mail body and makes it 15 lines long (see screenshot below). Because it doubles the size of e-mails as clients "handle" the issue by sending out plain text and HTML versions of the same e-mail. Because people spend more time choosing a font that the recipient probably doesn't even have on their system than in choosing their words carefully. Because it wreaks havoc with any mailing list that sends out digests. Because it forces programmers writing e-mail clients to choose between supporting it and implementing features that will actually help handle e-mail. Because it violates the e-mail standards and protocols unnecessarily. Most users never use any of the "advanced" options and those who do typically go overboard -- usually spammers who use HTML's fancy styles as a way to garner attention. The only possible reasonable purposes for HTML e-mail are simple text styles such as bold and italics which can be expressed _in_ *other* WAYS that are /universally/ readable. :-) Because it encourages companies to think it's OK to do things like include code that will let them know if you're reading their e-mail. This actually happened to a friend, who received an e-mail from infobeat asking why he wasn't reading their daily news e-mails. I consider that a gross violation of privacy. Because its presence, and the public's complicity with it, encourages the abuse of advertising bloat in your inbox. Knowing they can do eye-catching banner ads, spammers and corporations (such as Barnes and Noble) will fill half a page with ads for this and that, creating visual and mental clutter we'd all be better off without. We get enough of that on the web - we don't need it in our inboxes as well. Matt Pervy adds this observation: Some would say that advertising is heavily reliant on visual elements to be successful. In most cases, this is true; but not in the computer industry. A picture of a CD-RW drive unit tells us absolutely nothing about the product, other than the fact that it exists. TEXT tells us that it burns CDR at 16X, burns CDRW at 10X, and reads at 40X. A picture of a CPU is use-less in advertising. TEXT tells us that it's an Intel Pentium 4 processor, running at 1.x Giga-Hertz, capable of blasting the etc, etc. To unsubscribe from this list just send an e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a BLANK subject line and the single word "UNSUBSCRIBE" (without the quotes) in the body or visit http://www.RollTideFan.net
