Talk:HTML email

Missing: Origins of HTML email

The article doesn't seem to mention who introduced HTML E-mail. I've heard it was Microsoft but I hope someone that knows more details would add that information to the article. Thank you!
79.134.123.82 (talk) 10:43, 21 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Lots of things are attributed to Microsoft without good reason. If you go to the specifications, RFC 1049 (1988) listed Postscript, SCRIBE, SGML TeX and troff. The first MIME RFC, RFC 1341 (1992) just specified text/plain and text/richtext. The latter was some SGML bastard and (it seems to me) weakly defined. RFC 2045 and friends (1996) don't seem to mention HTML either, but provide ways to register new types, such as text/html.

And there I ran out of time. But I agree: who introduced it and where, if anywhere, it was standardized – that should be in the article. JöG (talk) 08:50, 20 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Languages

I'm not too familiar with foreign language encodings and such, but apparently. using HTML to encode languages like Japanese is easier and preferred, though I imagine there is a way to send non-ASCII in the original plain text specs? — Omegatron 13:12, 15 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Quoting, implementation

It should explain how quoting is often ruined by the fixed width of text/plain, like:

> > First message here and it g
oes
> > on to the next line and the
n
> > goes onto the next line, to
o.

> Then a reply is here and it 
> goes onto the next line and 
> then goes onto the next line,
> too.

Then another reply here and 
going onto the next line and 
another line here.

and how HTML handles this with blockquote tags and regular wrapping text. I can't find the conventions or standards behind plain text email, but it seems that the 78 character horizontal limit was set by RFC 2822, to ensure that plain text shows up the same way on different terminals. I have seen a number of other limits proposed, though, from 60 to 80 characters, so I don't know if there are fights about this, too, or what. I assume that they allow for the addition of some quoting > signs, but probably also assume that the writer will be "netiquettely" and only quote the last message. Of course this is a wild assumption, in emails this is not the case, and often on newsgroups, so we get the bad wrapping thing. Also screws up ASCII art, etc. HTML Threading: Conventions for use of HTML in email discusses using semantic blockquote markup to indicate the author of each snippet of text, so that email clients can display email threads efficiently. I have a feeling gmail takes advantage of this for conversation view, but maybe not.

Using HTML in E-mail explains some of the technical aspects of how messages with inline content are coded, which we should include. — Omegatron 04:45, 16 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Also, I know that seeing the crazy formatting that some people use helps me to identify the type of person they are, and avoid buying things from them, for instance. We'd need to find a reference of someone saying something similar, though, to include it. — Omegatron 05:02, 16 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Standardization

Has anyone attempted to standardize the features and markup? Clearly it hasn't been standardized, but were there any attempts? — Omegatron 18:27, 23 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

HTML Email and Outlook 2007

I'm no expert, but this article implies there might be a problem with the rendering of HTML email in the upcoming new release of Outlook. Might someone want to add something about this? - 10:46, 26 July 2007 (GMT)

I would imagine there are problems with rendering of HTML email in all releases of Outlook. — Omegatron 23:45, 26 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Outlook 2007 & 2010 use Microsoft Word's 'unique' HTML rendering engine. Outlook 2003 used Internet Explorer's. 01:47, 18 August 2010 (GMT)

html email madness!

Why is it in the last year all the sudden many automated emailers are sending all html emails not even with multipart and thus no plain text area above the html? Not only is it desirable to not render html for security reasons, but bandwidth requirements on mobile devices, etc., I also like plain text for simplicity. I see many of these emails are just using the default font/color/size anyway so what's the point? 66.114.93.6 (talk) 00:07, 3 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

POV

The article is subtly biased in favor of HTML in mail.

The intro only mentions a long list benefits, and none of the drawbacks
The adoption section uses weasel wording to make opponents look like extremists: they are vocal and reject even MIME.
In the remaining sections there is, I think, a tendency to downplay the negative aspects; to mention it but explaining why it is (no longer) relevant.

JöG (talk) 09:07, 20 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]