Wrong, wrong, wrong, I'm afraid.

Fortunately, everyone ignored the ultra-geeks, and the "DTP geeks" won (the geeks who thought that web pages should look like they've been desktop published).

And this is precisely why websites require seperate versions for display on PDAs, mobile phones etc.

The W3C (World Wide Web consortium, the standards-setting body for such things) has been spending most of the last 10 years trying to fix the short-sighted "make it look pretty" system which we've been stuck with.

In its initial conception, HTML described what a document contained, rather than how it should be displayed. When the first barrier - the IMG tag - fell, HTML ended up being a mish-mash of different things all rolled into one - including, for example, the OBJECT tag which is the source of 99% of all browser security issues (as far as IE is concerned, anyway).

It is only recently that standards such as XHTML and CSS have brought some semblance of order back to the systems we use to create web sites. It should be noted that most of the last four years has been taken up with cleaning up the gigantic mess created in the previous four years, which is why browser technology has barely moved on in that time (the feature set of the current version of IE is essentially the same as it was four years ago, with the same being largely true of Opera and Netscape/Mozilla).

In short, a web page should simply consist of content. How it is displayed is determined seperately, either by a style sheet or by the user's browser settings (Opera supports this approach quite elegantly). The reasoning behind this should be obvious - it's not always possible to display a web page in the same way on different hardware platforms, particularly mobile devices. There's also an accessibility issue for disabled users - pure content pages are much more easily translated by text-to-speech converters, for example.

As far as HTML emails are concerned, I think the argument against them used to be that not all e-mail clients supported HTML. This is no longer a valid point. There are also some security concerns (HTML emails can be used to confirm receipt of a message without the user's knowledge, an obvious boon for spammers who can then tell that an account is active and spam it some more). Personally, my objection to HTML emails is that I'd rather read what a person has to say, than what colour they say it in. Pink text on a green background doesn't help make your point, and it's hard to take anything seriously in Comic Sans MS.

Of course "pink text on a green background" is horrible. But should we reject desktop publishing software simply because a couple of people will design documents that are pink on green? The vast majority of HTML e-mails I receive are in Helvetica or Verdana or Times, at a sensible point size, and just use formatting to add clarity.

Rob:

One of the reasons I use the Opera browser is that it makes it easier to view web-pages with a font-size and colors of one's own choosing, rather than being stuck with what the author wants.

By the same token, I'd prefer to read my email in a font and color and size of my own choosing (in my case, a gray background because computer white is tough on the eyes!), not what the author tries to force on me! I even use a proxy server to send my emails to a locally-created NNTP newsgroup so that I can read them in a newsreader that doesn't do HTML.

Sorry, Alex.

One reason for eschewing HTML email is that it seems to be preferred by spammers. I have found that in general a rule that says HTML only email goes to the trash significantly reduces my spam.

To be honest if you need to have special effects in an email message its probably better to enclude the special effects in a document that you enclose with the email

' a web page should simply consist of content '

Are you completely mad? You are missing the whole modern ethos! Content is deprecated. Nobody gets anywhere with content. It is all about the superficial short term. Just look at architecture/politics/business/everything.

Even HTML is sub-optimal, the preferred way to send a message such as 'Hello dave, did ya see the macth last nite? L8rs !' is to use a top-end rendering package to create a photoreal HDTV animation of a landscape with the letters as flames. (I believe this feature is in service pack 2 of longhorn).

Ted: you do realise that 99.9999999999999% of e-mail users would never think of changing the colour that e-mails appear on the screen, nor know the meaning of using "a proxy server to send my emails to a locally-created NNTP newsgroup".

In the words of several people "The noise is the signal".

Purists claim that the web should only provide content and semantic hints, such as "these three words are a headline" or "this word should be emphasised". How a headline is displayed (e.g. centered and in a larger font), or how emphasis is shown (e.g. in red or in bold), is, say the purists, a separate matter. Originally the purists thought it was so separate that it should be down the the browser, a truly crackfuelled idea that could only be thought up by someone with no real skill in communicating.

Luckily, the web was seized upon by less dogmatic people, and started doing useful things, albeit in a way that was unmaintainable and inelegant. But fun and useful.

Then, they figured out that semantics and visuals should simply be _technically_ separated, and along came CSS. And there was much rejoicing.

But they are all wrong anyway, because in fact you can't truly separate communication into semantics (the 'content') and display. Take the word 'Metallica'. Imagine the heavy metal band of this name, and the way they write the word. Now imagine the comany that makes anodized metal surfaces, called Metallica. They use the same word, but they have a rather dull corporate typescript.

The semantic value is the same in both cases - none - because the word is a proper name - it merely denotes some entity such as a rock band or a metal finishing company.

And yet the different ways the word is written carries a large amount of meaning - so much in fact, that although the word 'Metallica' has no true semantic value of its own, you can immediately tell all sorts of things about each of the two Metallicas.

I only go into this level of detail, so that I can then pour scorn on the Semantic Web, a crazy hubristic enterprise that fails to recognise such things.

Rubbish, I'm afraid Alex.

One of the many good reasons to eschew HTML e-mail is the very same reason browser-side style sheets never took off: most people will make them look awful because most people have no taste, much less design-sense.

Samizdata looks good because none of the authors or commenters get to inflict their lack of skill on the look of the site; it was done once, and well done, by a man who knows what he's doing. Thank goodness its authors aren't able to say "Colour looks wonderful for headlines, " as you do, "today I fancy lime green".

And if you want me to read your e-mail, I suggest you send just the words. Everything else will go, unread, straight in the trash.

Alex:

So the fact that the majority of users can't be bothered to change the font the sender selected means that I shouldn't have the choice of font I want to read incoming messages in?

Graphic design != web-publishing.

Heresy. Heresy!!

Repeat after me: The Web is not Email.

Sending HTML-emails is a big downer for those of us who view our email on portable devices [Blackberries, cellphones] which display the body-part of the email as-is because they can't render it.

It's also a no-no if you use an email-to-speech reader (many visually-handicapped people do this, and also a number of corporate systems which 'read' your emails to you from your mailbox over the phone).

HTML-emails can also camouflage malicious content [phishing, for example] which would otherwise be obvious if the email was rendered as raw text.

The reason HTML emails are unsafe if because its a doddle to insert an 1 pixel image that you would not know was there to act as a Web Beacon. It's a validator for an email address which spammers love. Avoid HTML email at all costs

I do not mind if people send me html e-mails, just as long as they don't mind if I delete them unread.

Re-arrange these words to form a well-known sentence:

1. Way
2. No

HTML e-mail is inherently insecure; it is used as a way to try and get control of your computer, and takes up unecessary bandwidth and storage space.

Find a decent e-mail program of your choice and set it to display email as you like it: large fonts, proportioned fonts, whatever. Just don't ever tell the program to display HTML as HTML. J00 will b3 owzor3d, d00d.

Alex, you complain that early web purists urged us all to use plain text, then urge everyone to use HTML? How are you being any different? Furthmore, every time you use your computer, you're trusting the experts who wrote your software. Or, if you aren't (because you use only OSS and read the source code of all the apps you use), most people are.

I'm a designer, so I'm pretty happy that I'm able to communicate to users how I'd like my content to look. As a consumer, I'm happy that there are methods for consumers to get around this. Firefox plugins that allow the disabling of CSS, reading content as text-only in RSS aggregators, etc.

So anyway, in the spirit of your user's-will-should-prevail approach, I say: waste as much time as you want prettifying your (hypothetical) email to me. When my email program displays it, it will do so according to my preferences and not yours - and show me only text.

;-)

Web bugs are a solved problem. If you use a vaguely modern email client like eg: Thunderbird, then it will block external images except with your permission.

The main points against HTML email I can see are:

1) It exposes crap, antique, ill-designed email clients to hacks and web bugs. Solution: don't use those email clients.

2) It's abused by spammers to send you disgusting porn, and by co-workers to send you "personalized" mail in lurid color schemes. Well-configured spam filters will sort these apart, but you still get to wince at your boss's cursive blue on mauve.

3) I can't really see any reason. I mean *bold* and /italic/ are nice, but you can simulate them like I just did, and modern email viewers will even recognize and render that markup. To what end, headlines and fancy graphics? A web page is that graphical, but any good one took a team of pro designers and week to code, test and tune. Would you do that for an email? Or if not, why include the capacity?

HTML emails are a pain to get; so I make sure they are shut off. They tend to be large in size, don't load properly and as other people have pointed out do not work well on phones or PDAs.

When it comes to email its k.i.s.s.; well that is if you want your email read...

What I find strange is the time and effort people at work use to make their pretty HTML email signatures. Things flying in from all directions, or the little phone that rings next to their phone number. Some even have sound.

So far (we've been using Outlook for three years and HTML emails are obligatory) I've noticed that every person with a spiffy signature is a complete twat and actually causes more problems than they solve.

Amazing.

I'm a graphic designer, and I delete most html e-mail before the graphics even have a chance to load. I want nothing fancy in an e-mail. If I want to see something formatted, I want it sent as an attachment.

Those of you who like html e-mail have had too much Kool-Aid, IMHO.

Bravo Alex, the days of plain-text emails are certainly numbered. Regarding the oft-quoted reason of "spammers", I can't say I've used a mail client in the past year or so that doesn't disable images in HTML emails by default. Gmail, Outlook, Thunderbird, take your pick, they all disable by default.

As for the "HTML emails are huge" argument, a quick poll of my own inbox shows a plain text email at 9KB and an HTML formatted email at 15KB. With an average PDF running at > 100KB and a Word Doc at > 60KB for a document of decent length, these differences in size are so small as to be negligible, particularly with disk space running at about 50p/GB. If you want to complain about size, complain about unsolicited attachments, not HTML.

Plain text emails are horrific. Mono-spaced text is making a mockery of the technology we've come to expect from modern correspondence and looks far too primitive. Agreed, lime green on shocking pink is grounds for assassination, but I can list many websites that suffer from the same affliction, much as I can offer thousands that have a struck a balance between content and presentation.

HTML makes the web and email bearable, reading plain text all day would be enough to send one insane.

I've yet to see someone pick up a newspaper and say, "That's dreadful - using different fonts on the front page. Doesn't the editor get it, I just want to read the words?"

Nor have I yet made a fan of plain text email who also says, "I don't bother with colour TV - the colours just get in the way of content. It's only black and white for me."

The world is stuffed full of occassions where sensible use of fonts, colours and layout make information easier to understand, quicker to comprehend and even sometimes more fun.

What really makes email uniquely different that it alone should be a medium where the only acceptable way of presenting information is all in the same font, all in the same size, all in the same colour?

(Yes, I know you can do some formatting without using HTML emails, but the essential point remains).

Unlike almost everyone else, I agree with you. That is, as long as you're only claiming that it's time to get away from insisting on the more bare-bones plain-text Universe and embrace some font choices and some color choices. If you are instead insisting that we the readers be entirely at the mercy of the senders, well I don't see why that should ever happen, nor do I think it likely.

Others have pointed out there are useful reasons and useful ways for the receiver of the communication to filter what the sender sent.

I find it interesting that, as far as I can tell, the actual blog entry is all about HTML email, not web pages in general.

Why, I wonder, should people have a problem with you sending HTML email anyway? If the receivers are as geeky as they claim, surely they can just strip the HTML from the message? And, with just a bit more effort, they can probably do it in a way that loses little or no content.

The default behavior of Google mail is probably a good example template--it renders HTML email, but does not display any of the images in the email unless you specifically ask it to.

Martin: Plain text emails are horrific. Mono-spaced text is making a mockery of the technology we've come to expect from modern correspondence and looks far too primitive.
Martin, you're missing the point, *you* the end user can choose your font to read in if I send in plain text, you're not forced to read it in the way the sender *thinks* you ought to.

I, personally, will only send html email if I need to send a long link that won't survice word wrapping, even then I could just call up a tinyurl code if need be. That's it. Any encoded email plays havoc with reader software for visually impaired and requires compatibility with the end user. I do business all over the world, how do I know what platform they're running? Quoted Printable is the standard, it works, we can use it.

It's not about 'web purism', it's about ensuring receipt properly. Many have said that 'modern spam filters' catch their spam, so html formats aren't a problem. True, they wouldn't be; /if/ you're whitelisted on the recipients spam filtering.

If you send in html, you will be more likely to get filtered into the spam folder. Many people I know never check their spam, most glance at it irregularly. HTML formatting makes you more likely to go from the 'cecked constantly' inbox into the 'glanced at occasionally' spam/junk folder. This is especially likely if your mail contains any trigger words or marketing speak. *If* you're lucky, they'll spot your email, if you're even *more* lucky they'll know how to whitelist you so it doesn't happen again.

If. If your emails sent out are important to your business, send in plain text. It's that simple.

Erm, did I miss the part of the article where people aren't being allowed to send HTML emails? If not, I don't see what all the fuss is about.

When the benefits of full-blown HTML emails (which are, er, what again? Prettier text than modern-day clients can render plain-text emails in?) outweigh the downsides (security risks, HTML compatibility issues, platform rendering issues, spam exploits, text size/color legibility issues, etc.) then it will become accepted as the standard.

Until that happens, I recommend that you feel free to send HTML email to anyone you want, but not be offended when they feel equally free to discard it unread as being more trouble than it's worth.

If you wanted to cry out for the revision of e-mail practices, you picked a fairly trivial thing to get exercised about.

Here's food for thought. Normal e-mail is essentially a postcard. Anybody in transit can write on it and unlike the handwriting on postcards, you can't tell the difference and determine who inserted which bits. If you really want to do an act of good citizenship and advocate a change in e-mailing habits, try using PGP or some other encryption/mail signing software so that you can at least determine that your mail hasn't been tampered with.

I don't get this "ugly text" complaint, as if folks are stuck in Courier. Any mail reader can be set to display in a proportional font, will let you choose which, and most can do text re-wrapping. Result, pretty text. Unless you have some other definition of pretty?

Rob Knight makes a good point. I'd like to commend microformats to Samizdata readers as an attempt to build meaning from existing examples on the web, as a Hayekian kosmos rather than an w3c diktat. Or something like that.

One thing I haven't noticed anyone point out: what's wrong with RTF (Rich Text Format) e-mails?

RTF allows users to specify font face, size, weight, colour, etc., but degrades much more gracefully than HTML if necessary. It doesn't have the GAPING SECURITY HOLES of HTML e-mail, either, though I do grant that most modern mail clients are quite good about plugging those.

Personally I use RTF by default, plain text if necessary, but never HTML.

As for separating content from presentation, I don't think that's a valid argument in this case. The sender attaches a presentation style, and the receiver can allow it, over-ride it, or remove it entirely. HTML is just one type of presentation style that can be used.

RTF is essentially a M$ version of HTML, it's non-standards compliant and can display *really* badly in non-M$ clients.

I'm forced to use M$ Outlook at work, never elsewhere.

RTF is a 1980s confection with a slew of inbuilt assumptions that make it utterly dated and useless for anything but the simplest word processor documents in US English. Its functionality is a subset of HTML and its standard is wholly owned by Microsoft. I do not consider RTF email to be good practise in any circumstance except a closed all-windows intranet, and even there only as a legacy format.

Mark:I've yet to see someone pick up a newspaper and say, "That's dreadful - using different fonts on the front page. Doesn't the editor get it, I just want to read the words?"

There's a big difference between designing for a print medium where you know, and control, the dimensions and resolution of the final presentation, and online publishing, where you don't. How does the author know anything at all about whether 10pt Arial will display well on my machine, or anyone else's? That highly formatted e-mail might look fine on a 17 inch monitor at 800x600, and be unreadable on a 21 inch monitor at 1280x 1024, because the letters will be too small. This applies to HTML formatted e-mail as well as web publishing. You don't know the width or height, in pixels, of the display area of either my web browser or my e-mail client. You don't know the DPI rating of my monitor. You don't even know whether I have the same set of fonts installed on my machine. (For example, I deleted Arial, because it renders poorly, for some reason.)

And yes, Mark, sometimes people do pick up print media and complain about readability. Do you think that the "fine print" sections of things such as a lot of EULAs, warranty cards, and credit contracts are a good thing?

The whole point of publishing is to be read. Making things difficult to read defeats the purpose. (Except for those "fine print" things, which are usually exclusions and limitations which the publishers hope you'll not notice.)

Feel free to send me lurid, badly designed, impossible-to-read emails any day you'd like. Fill them to the brim with images and suck up all your bandwidth; I'm okay with that too. Even in Outlook I can force your messages to look the way I like -- i.e. readable.

Just don't ask me what I think of the "jump-rope cows and elephants wearing pink tutus" stationary you made yourself, because heaven knows, I'll never see it.

(I wouldn't mind basic, BBCode level formatting capabilities in my standard emails -- but I'm not willing to foist HTML on everyone who gets the emails, just because I want to emphasize one word in a message that took forty-five seconds to write)

The size of emails is significant. My inbox currently contains 4430 emails, with an average size of 10K. It gets backed up onto CD weekly with the rest of my working documents. A full search through the contents of every email takes 45 seconds - long enough to be irritating; short enough to be practical. Make emails 5 times bigger, and it would probably take 5 times longer.

Mark: "I've yet to see someone pick up a newspaper and say, "That's dreadful - using different fonts on the front page. Doesn't the editor get it, I just want to read the words?""

But one of the elementary rules of newsaper design is not to have too many fonts or type sizes on the page as it confuses the reader. For the same reason even irregular-sized blocks of headline and body copy are discouraged nowadays: 'modular' rectangles are the norm.

This applies a fortiori in webpage design, since the eye does not roam over and scan the page as readily as on paper. The scroll bar or mouse button has to be used. One day we may have wafer-thin, flexible screens which can be handled like newsprint. Until then, KISS-- but they don't.

Many websites' opening/home pages are chock full of bells and whistles: flashing ads, Java, forests of links with buttons, big pix, all the stuff that takes so long to load or refresh that the recipient loses interest or the connection times out. The entry to a site should be easy to assimilate, like the front page of a newspaper which either announces the main items of the day or (more and more nowadays) merely flags what's inside or lays into one hot topic, as the Indie does.

Fancy junk email is self-defeating, but so few editors or authors have any notion of the principles of graphic design that ugly, muddled, cluttered non-communucation is the usual outcome. And because spam is virtually free to generate at the margin, there is no incentive to study how it is received (*if* it is ever read). Email marketing is the maddest kind of scattershot rice-and-barn-door process ever invented. It makes paid mailshots look like models of austere precision. The punter can only fight back by filtering out almost everything except what arrives from trusted or expected senders. Not to mention that so much spam is at best impertinent and at worst grossly offensive.

In short, it's a problem that ten years of widespread internet use has left further than ever from resolving. Some marketeers are beginning to pine for the bad old days of restricted, one-way channels of communication as the pesky customer grows ever more elusive. I foresee the danger of calls from the corporates for the WWW to be 'cleaned up' and traffic-patrolled, like radio airwaves in the early ether-grab days after World War One when that RINO statist Herbert Hoover established the FCC. An unholy alliance with politicians may bring the dead hand of censorship down on us.

I don't see the problem. As long as the HTML is from limited secure set and only contains images with attachment URLs (definitely no http URLs).

"go into the Preferences window of your e-mail program, and tell it to compose HTML e-mail."

And of course, never expect to hear from me again, as I nearly always delete html email without reading it as I have not the time to inspect for virii, 1 pixel images that validate my existance to a spammer, etc, etc, etc.

Your computer, your choice.

The reason for simple plain text email is simple: less bandwidth. Next time you receive an HTML email created by a Microsoft product (even something where the text body is as small as this comment), do a "view source" on it. You will see a whole screenful or more of non-standard, awful HTML markup code doing who knows what, while on the screen there are but a few sentences.

All that extra crap needs to be sent along with the content just to make the title blink or some such nonsense, so the message ends up being four times the size. And also for the person that mentioned mobile phones: readability is one thing, but when you are paying the extortionate rates that wireless companies charge for data plans on mobiles, every byte counts.

I'd say that 35% - 40% of e-mails I receive are HTML format. I'd say that most e-mails I get from people who work in merchant banks, FTSE 100 companies, and public affairs use HTML formatted e-mails. I don't see realistically how you can delete e-mails in that format - you'd end up cutting off your nose to spite your face.

As for the whole security issue, it's a non issue. Recent e-mail clients do not load images in e-mail unless you have the address in your address book, or you click a button to display the image.≈

I'd say that 35% - 40% of e-mails I receive are HTML format. I'd say that most e-mails I get from people who work in merchant banks, FTSE 100 companies, and public affairs use HTML formatted e-mails. I don't see realistically how you can delete e-mails in that format - you'd end up cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Amazing. Your argument in this comment is that HTML email is so widespread, and so necessary, that people use it all the time and it can't be ignored. And yet, your original post complained that people needed to start using it, because no one uses it. Something here doesn't make sense.

As for the whole security issue, it's a non issue. Recent e-mail clients do not load images in e-mail unless you have the address in your address book, or you click a button to display the image.≈

Yes, email clients that disable all HTML effects and render only the plain text of the message do, in fact, prevent most of the HTML exploits from working. But again, that rather defeats your original argument which is that HTML email is a good and necessary thing.

It certainly doesn't seem like such a good and necessary thing to me when A) the email messages are still efficacious even with the HTML enhancements stripped out, and B) you need an email client that will by default strip out all the HTML enhancements in order to safely open any HTML email in the first place.

I'll repeat my point from earlier: When the benefits of full-blown HTML email (which are, er, what again?) outweigh the downsides (security risks, HTML compatibility issues, platform rendering issues, spam exploits, text size/color legibility issues, etc.) then it will become accepted as the standard.

All I was saying in my blog really is that it's nice to be able to use italics and simple formatting, just like I would if writing a letter from Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.

I wasn't saying that no one uses HTML e-mail. But that pesky IT managers disable it quite often, making e-mail less useful.

Matt: sure, badly down HTML emails are, well, bad. But just as you wouldn't look at a badly done newspaper layout and say, "Gee, the answer is never to use photos or different fonts or colour", I don't see why the fact that HTML email can be (and often is) done badly is a reason to say it should never be used.

And as for why - well, there are times when fonts, colour and other layout is useful in my view. That's why so much different electronic communications, such as websites and blogs, use it.

Unless you are paying me, all HTML email I recieve goes to trash and will receive no response. If you do wish to send me HTML email, you can purchase an HTML email reading token from me via PayPal. It's £10 per email. No guarantee of response.

There's a free market solution. If you really want to send me HTML emails, you can pay me for the inconvenience.