Re: No subset for email

On 23/02/2007 23:13, Pierre Saslawsky wrote:

> Companies already use HTML and CSS extensively when sending bulk-mail to 
> their customers. They won't come back to rich-text.

Agreed 100%.

> On the opposite, 
> personal emailers are going to catch up with corporate products. Apple 
> Mail in Leopard[1] offers a set of stationery templates which might just 
> be for now non-editable socially-correct eye-candy with some proprietary 
> extensions to add flashy little tricks when composing a message, but 
> imagine if emailers could all import and share fully standard compliant 
> HTML + CSS templates... Of course, the authors of the thousands of 
> stylesheets that are used to style blog pages would start creating email 
> templates that match the look of their blogs. An email would look like a 
> little blog entry written just for you. Personalization does matter; 
> Blogger and MySpace would have never had the success they had if 
> everybody was still using Lynx.

Right. That's why CSS in email should be reliable. It's not, as of
today.

> I think the only point where the need for an HTML subset in email 
> recoups the needs in Instant Messaging and blog comments would be in the 
> "contentEditable" parts of an email template. Still, in that case, the 
> limitation would have to be in the authoring tools, not in the 
> specifications of what can be transmitted over the wire, nor what should 
> be accepted by the receiving client.

You forget one point : if one receives an HTML-based email and replies
to that message in HTML, the original prose must be readable and its
styles and look'n'feel should not impact the new text.

> On a side-note, I find it amusing how some of the most vocal proponents 
> of web standards push for their early and complete adoption in browsers 
> and authoring tools, and yet want to keep them off their email. 
> End-users will not have such qualms.

Exactly my point when I sent my original message to the AC list.

</Daniel>

Received on Monday, 5 March 2007 09:45:38 UTC