On 4 Aug 2008, 2:46 pm, waltd wrote:
Do you remember when Desktop Publishing first came out, and people
with absolutely no design training – or even sense – started using
12 fonts in a single sentence, just because they could?
Yes, but I don’t know what point exactly you’re making here. People eventually learnt how to do DTP properly and design of publications of all types has undoubtedly advanced dramatically since those times largely because of the advent of the technology. The ease of access of DTP was part of the evolution of communications to its current state. Yes, there were people who didn’t make best use of it, but we’re human beings and therefore by definition flawed. But that has never been a reason to stop progress.
E-mail is designed to be a lightweight protocol, visible on the most
basic or advanced of devices. It is as close to a Rosetta stone as
there is in this modern world. If your message cannot be understood
in 7-bit ASCII text, perhaps you should consider a different medium
with which to deliver it.
This argument is nonsensical in my view. Email may have originally been designed to be a lightweight protocol, but there are many many examples of things which were originally simple but have evolved over time to become more sophisticated. Humble beginnings do not mean that development is not a valid route forwards.
The message is clearly in the words, but pictures and other elements of a document have great value too in complementing and enhancing the message. Otherwise we would not have books, newspapers and other documents with anything but text in them. Can you honestly say that all of the illustrations, graphs, pictures and so on in documents are worthless?
Email is communication, just like any other form. Why should it be held back artificially to only consist of text, when all other forms of communication have evolved beyond that point?
Microsoft came up with the MIME extension to e-mail as part of their
“embrace and extend” approach to standards, simply because they had
created Outlook (a proprietary, non-standard in-office communication
system, designed to sell desktop and server licenses of Windows) and
wanted to connect it to the existing (and much wider) world of the
Internet. The gray-beards who guard the Internet said, “fine, your
extension is accepted by the community process, but don’t forget that
every HTML part must have an equal and apposite (no, that’s not a
typo) Text part, otherwise your message is not in compliance.”
Sorry, once again I’m not sure what your point is here. I don’t like Microsoft, either, and abhor their attempts to subsume everything into their own closed world, but I do not believe that MIME was developed by Microsoft and it doesn’t exhibit any aspects of their approach of taking things over for their own purposes.
Furthermore it has always seemed to me that the MIME standard is rather admirable. It is basically a totally open and extensible format built on top of an original simple and hence very limited format which has effectively become the transport layer.
Mail (and every other standard e-mail editing application) creates
compliant multipart messages, where an HTML part is balanced by a
matching Text part, and the recipient (who is the person in charge
here – never forget) gets to choose which one to read. The other
part is ignored.
Freeway can easily create the HTML part. But particularly if you have
used a large amount of graphic text – just like the Viagra merchants
of the world – how would it decide what to use there to make the
Text equivalent?
Freeway doesn’t have any involvement in this process. Freeway would not be creating the email, only the stationery (within the guidelines laid down in the Apple documentation). The handling of the text would obviously be down to Apple Mail.
And if you have laid out your HTML part in layers
(which the bulk of e-mail applications cannot understand or display)
how would it decide in what order to place the text? Your message
would make as much sense as a bag of shredder fluff.
Now this is a valid point - it would obviously only be appropriate to use basic HTML elements, so I can see that this could be a problem. Not insurmountable, but it does complicate the process.
I don’t oppose progress at all. And I have been called crazy before,
and consider it a badge of honor, but please humor me here. My
opinion is founded on decades of real-world experience, and not on
pure whim. Just because you can do something (as in a ransom-note
design) doesn’t mean you necessarily should.
But the internet is a democratic environment and you can’t stop it from evolving the way that people want. Unless you feel that you can do a better job than Canute in that respect.
Your real-world experience is respected, but bear in mind that circumstances change and the world evolves. I do think you should reconsider your position on HTML email. It is here and it’s not going to go away, and it is regularly used for entirely valid and worthwhile purposes. Of course, if you have totally eschewed and exposure to it you might not be aware of how it is being used today. If this is the case then you should consider lifting your head out of the sand and looking around some time!
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