Re[2]: Life after PMMail

[Simon Bowring]

>If your customers/your boss asks you to send an
>HTML mail because they want to send a message with pictures, links,
>bold letter and so you have two options:
>
>* a) Quit your job
>* b) Use HTML, even if you don't like.

Or,

1. Use an editor to make the HTML page (one of the many WYSIWYG HTML 
   editors will do if you must produce aweful crap).
2. Attach the HTML file to your email and send it

The receiver should then extract the attachment and view it in a 
suitable viewer (which should be as simple as double clicking
on the attachment for windows weanies).  

No standards broken, HTML mail sent, at no point did the mailer have 
to become a web browser (which is the root problem)!

This keeps the lovely, finished largely static email standards 
intact, no-one has to buy a new email program, no-one has to upgrade 
the email program to HTML 17.93 every other fortnight (should be 
be using XML, DHTML, or MS$BollocksyMLduJour this week?), and allows 
the lowliest email program to handle the attachment in a sensible 
way.

And as far as background music goes (which someone mentioned in jest),
you generally need to use javascript in your web page (i.e write
a program) to differentiate between NetScape and IE in order to make 
background music work in the different brands of browser (which both
use embrace-and-extend(TM) to implement this non-standard feature
differently).  This illustrates a couple of the many minor problems 
with HTML as a "standard" for email text markup.  

If you've used four or five different company's web browsers, you
will probably have been amazed at the differences they show in the 
same web pages (not just because of bugs, but because of differing but
perfectly legal and intended interpretations of the deliberately 
"loose" spec).  If you are a professionalı web page designer then you 
will also know how very difficult it is to design pages that look the 
same on all browsers (unless you miss out all pictures, colours, fonts, 
frames, HTML 4, stylesheets, backgrounds etc).  

Since many web designers test only on NS or IE, they only see the tip of 
the iceberg of incompatibilities (most web designers don't even seem to 
check their pages for valid syntactically correct HTML).

The point is that people think HTML "will do" for "rich-text" - *it
won't*, a different sort of standard is required (could be an extreme
subset of HTML, but such a subset has not beed defined or agreed!).

Simon
--
ıBy professional web page designer, I don't mean someone who makes 
their living running Frontpage and pressing a button to publish, I mean
someone who understands the issues and constraints of the medium to
an expert/professional standard.