E-mail is not a platform for design - by Jeffrey Zeldman
Amen, brother! If you really, really “need” to show some visually styled presentation, send a link to a web page, because that’s where HTML & CSS belong.
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3 Comments
I’d have to agree to disagree. There are a lot of functional reasons why an HTML e-mail is necessary and degrades nicely. I guess my point is it doesn’t matter if there is a text version along with it.
I do hate getting html marketing emails without any text version on my BB.
Re-reading that last comment and it doesn’t make any sense.
So my point was, if an html e-mail has a plain text message included it shouldn’t matter whether there’s html or not. And I use HTML emails the majority of the time because it’s easier to communicate lengthy emails with lists, highlights and bold text.
Personally, I can’t think of any good reason to use HTML in e-mail.
There are conventions for lists and emphasis in text that predate HTML, so I don’t think those would be missed too much, if people learned to use the common text based alternatives if they felt they really needed them.
One of the main points of the article is that it usually doesn’t degrade nicely, and that if you really want that kind of control over how your e-mail is displayed to the end user, you just can’t get it reliably with HTML e-mail, plain and simple, outside of the most basic formatting.
Especially with the free availability to publish HTML pages for most people on the planet, I’d say that if you need HTML, write an HTML page and mail a link to it.