Aug 16
HTML email is not evil
A List Apart has an article on how to use CSS to create attractive, standards compliant HTML emails. You can read the article yourself. What’s interesting are the ten pages of reader comments.
As with many things internet related, there is great strength of feeling over HTML in email, amongst a very small group of people. Of course, many of these people believe themselves to be a hundred times more important than other internet users. Nonetheless, they repeatedly miss the point.
If you want markup, then please, put a link to the markup in the email, and I’ll go read it if I want.
You don’t seem to understand a fundamental thing, you have no right to demand ‘return receipt’ via log analysis.
If done in a standards compliant, responsible manner, why can’t some email have nice layout? You don’t give a reason!
One reader posts that if his boss demanded HTML marketing emails, he’d refuse:
So this is one point I would NOT concede to my boss. Just tell him, listen, HTML emails are bad and they WILL reflect badly on the company as they will clutter the mailboxes of our prospective clients, increase their download times and put us in the same league as spammers, which EVERYONE hates.
We all know bosses can be wrong, but why make yourself look foolish by peddling outdated prejudices against something?
Or what about the guy who is so desperate to cling onto plain text email that he’s prepared to look silly:
A simple plain ASCII text email will go miles further than HTML email or even CSS styled email.
Chaps, the game’s over: you lost control of the internet around eight years ago.
Why does HTML email ignite such ignorant comments? The reasons given by HTML email haters are, primarily:
- Email is meant to be plain text
- HTML email looks like spam
- They have an inexplicable hatred of anything that wasn’t around in 1993.
Oops. I think I’ve stumbled on it. These guys hate HTML email because it’s not part of the internet that used to shelter them from the real world. It doesn’t fit in with their command-line, text mode geekdom. One person commenting on the A List Apart article perceives exactly what the problem is:
Because they’re all tech-geeks, living in a pure uncorrupted binary world. The hardcore Linux warriors at my office are just the same.
HTML email doesn’t have to be an image tag, displaying a huge GIF. It can be a subtle, well thought out usability improvement. It can also be done in such a way that the majority of email clients can view it properly, as the article promotes.
We - the HTML email writers - realise that it isn’t suitable for every single email. Sometimes, though, it’s the best thing for the job. Anyone who says plain text email is the perfect communication medium, in all circumstances, is deluded.
Why do I let this bother me? Because this sort of person tends to be very vocal and to give projects and ideas a bad name. Just like the same type of person in the Linux community, they manage not only to miss the point themselves, but also to make it a lot harder for the real message ever to be heard.
Link
August 16th, 2004 at 3:51 pm
Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.
See, I’m in two minds about this. On the one hand, the possibility of misuse should not be an argument against any use, as one of my signatures says. On the other, for every enlightened reasonable decent HTML mailer there are a hundred who think that it’s great because they can add web bugs and JavaScript and great big adverts. Much like, say, handguns. The NRA will tell you that guns aren’t the problem; irresponsible users are. They are right. However, I much prefer the UK system, with them banned, to the US system, and I feel much the same about HTML mail; since most of the people who want to use it either can’t be trusted to be responsible or (frankly) consider it vital that they can italicise text in a mail which uses “2″ instead of “to” and “r” instead of “r”, I’d rather see it banished altogether than to keep it alive for the few people who will actually use its strengths.
Aq.
August 16th, 2004 at 3:59 pm
Cars kill people.
Cheese kills people.
Alcohol kills people.
Your tabacco kills people.
Wanna ban them too?
I’d suggest that no one will be killed by HTML email and that in an opt-in system, in appropriate circumstances, properly used HTML is a useful evolutionary step on from plain text email.
For example, you have a welcome email for a service which has lots of necessary information. You can strip out some and put it on the web instead but much still needs to go in the email. A little design can help to make that information much more easily digested by the reader, novice or otherwise.
August 16th, 2004 at 5:04 pm
I agree completely. Used properly, it’s a useful tool. My argument is that the vast majority of users do *not* use it properly. Same as guns, as I said, although your point about the relative consequences of misuse is a well-taken one.
Your argument has an edge of “well, I know *I* use it properly, so it must be OK”, which isn’t taking the wider community into account. However, again, I’m in two minds; in some situations I’m all for forcing the Right Thing on people, and in others I’m a believer in choice, even if misguided. The HTML emails thing brings me down on the Right Thing side (by which /I/ mean “no HTML email”, although you see it differently), but I’m not very far over onto that side.
August 16th, 2004 at 8:29 pm
Guns don’t kill people, rappers do.
http://www.youknowsit.co.uk/lowtech/
August 18th, 2004 at 9:14 pm
Guns don’t kill people WAPPERS do
In full elmer fudd stylee.
When you sign up for an opt-in email marketing thing you get the choice text only or html mail.
I always choose text only. If I want to get mail from these people I want it to be readable and not using tracking tricks.
It’s a simple matter to track the people you send emails to, to check they are getting them and are reading them by using an odd link in the html. For instance bg2werweqrqwer.jpg where the filename is unique to your mail. Not good.
Also html mails tend to be offensively bad. also not good.
I would prefer it if you got to see an example of the html messages and the company had a clear policy about how the messages are used and tracked.
A good xhtml+css email need not be offensive to me. It could be a good thing. I wouldn’t mind opting into a list where I got the latest alistapart articles every friday in my mailbox looking good and being well scripted as well as well written but unfortunatly most html mail isn’t like that.
As it stands 99% of html mail sucks a fat one. It only exists to scare the shite out of readers with offensive colours, heavy images and tracking goodies hidden from the user. This is why html mail pisses me off on mailing lists.
mailing list mail should be readable to everyone. I don’t want to be SHOUTED AT in h1 #ff0000 it should be just text. You don’t need to double the size of the emailed message and halve it’s readability to be different.
Marketing mail is different. If I choose to accept the messages from certain companies they should be well written, well scripted and well designed (with no hidden tracking bits and pieces unless they are upfront about it) then and only then would html mail be acceptable.
sparkes
August 26th, 2004 at 11:01 am
I think the above discussion has touched on the key points:
HTML email _can_ be very good, but on the whole it’s done badly. Additionally, the majority of people use it to just drop a huge image in their signature, which ends up filling up your mailbox with stuff that you don’t even need.
Admittedly, those of us who use console-based email clients like Mutt get a little frustrated if the email is full of tags. However, what I find even more distressing than HTML mail is mail that has been sent from within Microsoft Word, and comes with a huge amount of Word markup, even for a simple, 1 line email message.
Ultimately the problems is that people don’t write HTML mail - they write emails in a client that functions as a WYSIWYG HTML editor. And thus the quality of the HTML can often be poor, and the benefit is minor - backdrops, animated gifs, and large signature images. In the same way that I don’t want to look at bad HTML on the web, I don’t want to have to read my email in it either.