Comment by thieving_magpie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thieving_magpie | Hacker News Reader

thieving_magpie

techcrunch, we need to talk about your article titles.

Addressing the content of the article:

- "Gmail Makes Developers Shun Email", I can't think of any developer I know that shuns email, and they all pretty much use gmail.

- "How Gmail Breaks Email", to be frank... not even in the slightest. Sure, it sounds pretty annoying having to jump through all those hoops for a fancypants email.

- "Google should take the lead in bringing the web mail stakeholders from Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL together toward the support of a common set of CSS and HTML."

Who makes a demand like that of a company? Hey, Company X, gather every industry leader please and force them to all standardize to one spec. Am I the only one that would prefer companies to not be in the driver seat for these kinds of decisions? Isn't this what led to the IE6 debacle?

I really don't get these articles. Today I've read HN front page articles about horrible gmail is (my favorite email service for the past 10 years) and "Amazon kind of sucks". I must be out of touch.

It's an opinion piece from a guy who... apparently... wants to put image carousels into emails and is upset that GMail doesn't let him, and yet dares to intrude upon his beautiful iOS.

Hopefully no one exposes him to the ocean of old Outlook clients with crufty Word-based HTML renderers out there; he might die of a heart attack. Mentioning Pine/Alpine would be cruel as well.

Author here. Haha yes I write on experimental techniques like carousels mainly to get developers curious into the kinds of stuff they can do with just CSS.

I'm very aware of Outlook's backward HTML support, but at least its a single client. With Gmail, each of their clients has weird quirks that make it frustrating to code for.

As developers sometimes creating HTML emails are necessary, such as creating system generated reports for business users. Right now, the process is fraught with issues - including figuring out Outlook, so fixing this does not just benefit email marketers alone.

"Gmail Makes Developers Shun Email", I can't think of any developer I know that shuns email, and they all pretty much use gmail.

I think you've misinterpreted the phrase "Gmail Makes Developers Shun Email". TechCrunch writes:

Gmail and its plethora of rendering quirks is a big reason why developers avoid working on email.

This suggests that developers shun email clients as a development platform (i.e., working on email), not that developers don't use email themselves.

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