So I just read (thanks to a link from Jason’s del.icio.us feed) an interesting reversal of position on Jeffrey Zeldman’s blog on the subject of HTML e-mail. It references the Email Standards Project.
It’s an interesting approach, and probably the best way to handle the issue, but I still would recommend avoiding it at all costs, if it’s at all up to you.
The reason (primarily) is that at this time most e-mail clients are still very lacking in “real” support for standards-compliant HTML and CSS. If you stick within the limited scope of the common ground, it’s OK, I guess, but the problem inevitably becomes maintaining that stand, once you’ve agreed to do HTML main in the first place.
This stems from the fact that it’s usually the marketing geniuses who insist on the fancy presentation that requires HTML in the first place. The problem is that once you’re doing HTML at all, they know that you can make it look more like they want it to look, and they don’t care that you would need to resort to all kinds of non-standards-compliant table-based hackery in order to achieve that look consistently, due to the lack of consistent support in the various clients.
Yes, this is the slippery slope argument, and I guess you could just as easily argue that the only realistic way to tackle this problem is to work towards compliance in the major e-mail clients and embrace the ones that do offer it.
I just can’t help but not like the idea of HTML e-mail in the first place. We already have a perfectly good delivery platform for HTML: it’s called a web page. Last time I checked, almost all e-mail clients will convert a plain-text URL into a click-able link, so I say keep the e-mails themselves plain text, short and sweet, with a link to a web page for the full HTML content of what you’re trying to present.
8 Comments
Or just use HTML and plain text.
Personally, I really don’t like that option; just a bunch of wasted space with most of the same problems associated with HTML mail.
Plain text is plain text. It is wasted bandwidth but how can it have problems, since that’s what you’re saying you prefer anyways?
The problems associated with sending both are most of the problems that you have with sending HTML by itself (inconsistent formatting and/or ugly markup in order to try and achieve consistency). That’s my main objection: sending HTML at all in the message.
Trying to make it easier on plain text only users by also including the plain text along with the HTML doesn’t go very far (in my book), because it’s all still there. It’s definitely better than nothing, but it still doesn’t look good in a text only reader.
Sorry but that makes no sense.
Maybe I can explain it better:
The problems I have with HTML mail are mostly related to the issues that e-mail clients have with HTML that usually result in really ugly HTML being written to work around them. And the fact that e-mail was never originally intended to support HTML and I believe it would be better to use things that were (such as web pages), if you want to send HTML.
Adding plain text to that doesn’t really help at all, other than to give people who are using text only readers an easier way to read the message. Sure, it’s a little better than HTML only, but to me it still has most of the same problems.
Thanks for the post JB. While we can certainly appreciate your personal opinion on HTML email, that same marketing department is going to send HTML whether designers agree or not - it’s not going away.
We just want to work to make sure the HTML they send is lightweight, compliant and accessible.
Sending text+html means that for you, who prefers text, you never even see the HTML so it has no problems at all, apart from the additional (minor) use of bandwidth.
Yeah, I understand that some people will still insist on sending HTML in e-mail, and for those people, this project is a perfect approach to the issue. We might as well work towards the mail clients supporting standards based HTML if they’re going to support HTML at all.
For me, I’d just rather see HTML remain in web pages rendered by the browser, since we’ve already made so much progress on that front. A text only mail with a single hyperlink is a lot classier to me than HTML embedded in the e-mail itself.
I generally agree with Jeffrey’s points in his earlier anti-HTML post (as well as some of the comments there by people like Eric Meyer), and I don’t see any reason why those points are not still valid today.