[LINK] E-mail is not a platform for design

[Rick Welykochy]

Ivan Trundle wrote:

> E-mail is not a platform for design

Couldn't concur more with these sentiments.

Unfortunately I think there is a commodity affect of designed
emails working in, say, 90% of email clients. I refer to most
email clients being Lookout(!) or a variant thereof. HTML designed
in MS email clients renders fine in MS email recipients.

Beyond the HTML formatting, I am now putting up with attachments
from my uncle that are not readable by my client, i.e. some
MS form of an email embedded with an email. Life is too short
to find out what Mickeysoft have done now ... I just bin these.
(These attachments are kind of like the scourge of winmail.dat)

HTML in email presents an interoperability snag across the
Net similar to the problem of web designers designing just to one
"standard" (or lack thereof) called Internet Explorer 6 or 7.
Sadly, I think an XHTML can comply with W3C standards and yet
still only render and interact properly with an IE browser.
Similar goes for MS mail clientage.

The problem isn't going away anytime soon.


> Say it with me: HTML is for websites. CSS is for websites. GIFs and 
> JPEGs are for websites.
> 
> ASCII means never having to say you’re sorry.

I find it it quite a challenge to explain and get a functional
response and interest from my clients regarding "plain old text".

They've been weaned on word processing as the only way to handle
text. Notepad is an alien programme from outer geekspace. Looking
at an email or web page in plain text format twists their heads
right off.

Here is another maxim: Email is not FTP.

Interesting that the longer one has been on the Net and savvy with
its basic operations, the more one eschews Email as Web and Email as
FTP.

cheers
rickw



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Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services

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