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January 12, 2007
HTMLmail funkification
HTMLmail funkification: I'm a little gleeful at this... email marketers are saying that the switch in HTML rendering engines within the new Microsoft Outlook 2007 "takes us back 5 years". Fine with me... if you're pushing stuff at my publicly-accessible mailbox, then I just need the quickest-to-digest info, and prefer not to have tracking images or scripting in things strangers push at me. Try ASCII. It's ironic that a change in HTML engines still has such a big effect on existing content, though. Microsoft offers verbose documentation, and a Dreamweaver validation tool. The push ten years ago to stuff all HTML stuff in email is similar to what we've seen with "RSS" the past few years... a concise and flexible format comes under pressure to duplicate a richer format and instead becomes a lumbering beast. But... hmm... most of the documentation is just lists of attributes... but down at the very bottom it says "Flash: Only a red "X" shows in the area where the flash would display." Knocks out animated GIF too. If people put inline SWF in email then they'll be affected by a loss in prior functionality, so it seems strange to bury that info down at the bottom of a long document like this....
Posted by JohnDowdell at January 12, 2007 04:48 PM
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seriously john.... you're an evangelist working for Adobe (nee Macromedia), and you're advocating -- hell, gleeful about -- people NOT using HTML in email?
c'mon dude.
this might be an attempt to help resolve some security concerns MSFT has, but from a design & usability perspective it's certainly a step in the WRONG direction.
whether or not you think rich media / html email is a better experience than text & links, without QUESTION the end-user experience has been trending towards more, not less, of a desktop publishing / magazine-oriented (or at least newspaper-oriented) reading / viewing scenario.
[jd sez: If you entice me in, sure. If you're shoving stuff at me, no way.]
i can't imagine that the average user prefers more boring, undifferentiated, text paragraph after text paragraph... unless of course they're reading a book.
[jd sez: I prefer text which gets to the point.]
personally, i'd prefer a light touch to email, but still one that preserves options for nice formatting, graphics, and even lightweight client-side objects.
and i sort of thought an evangelist working for a rich media would too.. or are you using a lynx browser these days to view your Flex & Apollo rich media? ;)
respectfully disagreeing,
[jd sez: s'cool. ;-) ]
- dave mcclure
http://500hats.typepad.com/
Posted by: Dave McClure at January 12, 2007 05:28 PM
so john, it's totally cool if *you* prefer text, and as marketers people should probably make a text version available to you as an alternative...
however, removing the OPTION of rich media email / HTML completely isn't giving users alternatives...it's forcing all of us into the "text-only" box.
that's not choice or usability, that's dictatorship. (kind of like the aversion to abortion... don't like it? great, don't use it. but don't pre-empt my access to that option).
anyway, i'm using an extreme example there, but i hope you get the point.
(and again, i'm pretty sure they made the decision from a security, rather than a usability, standpoint... however i'd like to think there's a middle path)
again respectfully yours,
- dmc
Posted by: Dave McClure at January 12, 2007 06:34 PM
I can't believe how many people are completely misunderstanding the issue. This change does nothing to limit use of HTML email, all it means is that developers will have to use tables and font tags for years to come, instead of moving towards greater use of CSS.
(It's a shame we can't get to a situation where all HTML is forced to use only CSS for styling; email clients could then allow users to switch off styling and just get nicely marked-up text if they choose. HTML email is currently where web pages were in 1997.)
Posted by: Matt Round at January 13, 2007 01:46 AM