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.

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.

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.

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.