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Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I understand your point. You're projecting a lot, there's more to the world of computers than Google and Apple.

At any rate you choose to buy into Apple ecosystem. A big email provider changing how email works is not the same thing. For the record I host my own email server and use mutt as my main email client. The only Apple device I own is an old pre-iphone iPod.

If Google changes the expectations of email users everywhere then it won't be long until you end up with a broken experience if you don't support AMP email out of the box. Exactly what happened with HTML email: it's not rare these days to receive a multipart/alternative email where the plain text version is simply "see HTML". If AMP mail becomes mainstream it'll be like this but worse. Soon you'll have an HTML page that will tell you to "see AMP content".

I don't know if it's completely on purpose but that's by the book "embrace, extend and extinguish" by Google there.

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Falling into the 3-4 crowd myself I also agree with this. Changing emails - perhaps in an automatic fashion - to use AMP is going to do nothing but harm to anyone outside Google. Image inclusion the AMP way [1] alone will ruin HTML email for other services. If Google really wanted to improve emails they would push for full compliance HTML5 support. Because if emails could be built with grid layouts, content could be more semantic, you wouldn't need a plain text version, we'd use less mark up and save on server space and bandwidth.

[1] https://ampbyexample.com/components/amp-img/

Amazing. That link is solid white with JS disabled.

Why does Google routinely refuse to display text unless JS is enabled? Their developer blog does almost the same thing.

I think AMP is built on web components, which require JS.

It works for me with JS disabled.

I'm not seeing where you're demonstrating that Apple only affects people who "choose to buy into the Apple ecosystem" but gmail affects everybody.

I mean, there's truth to the idea that Google have more sway when it comes to trends on the internet, but when you say that a "a big email provider changing how email works", Apple could easily be the big email provider in that sentence

Because Apple owns its ecosystem. It owns iOS and the API apps use. It owns the app store.

Google doesn't own the email ecosystem. It's a decentralized system where thousands of actors exchange messages using standardized protocols. The last people who did what Google is doing were Microsoft. Remember winmail.dat? Remember the various hacks and options that litter open source mail clients and POP/IMAP servers to work around quirks and bugs in Outlook?

Just looking at my muttrc I find:

    # MS Outlook seems to like sending emails using cp1252 but setting the
    # charset to iso-8859-1
    charset-hook ^iso-8859-1$ cp1252

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Dovecot has a bunch of custom options as well. That's what happens when a major actor starts disrespecting the standards, out of ignorance, out of hubris or out of spite.

Between that and how Google seems to want to force Chrome down everybody's throat at all costs it really seems that somebody at Alphabet found an old Microsoft "howto" from the late 90's and decided that was a good plan.

>Apple could easily be the big email provider in that sentence

I don't understand, are you saying I shouldn't criticize Google for doing something because I don't criticize Apple for not doing it? Trust me if Apple ever pushes some custom "iMail" format I'll say the same thing.

I agree completely with your observation about Google EEE here.

Just wanted to say that you can read HTML emails in Mutt by having a browser, like Links2 or Lynx, do the formatting.

https://www.marksanborn.net/howto/reading-html-email-with-mu...

> At any rate you choose to buy into Apple ecosystem.

Yes and if I don't, too bad. I just can't iMessage the rest of my family who did.

Yesterday the HN discussion was about the terrible state of messaging and the roles many companies played in getting to where we are now.

Email works pretty well between multiple different providers or even your own server. How do plans that will “accidentally” take email closer to the current state of messaging help the internet work better?

What's stopping you from sending and receiving regular sms, mms messages to your iPhone using family? It's not like there is a separate app for iMessage and text messages.

Your SMS messages will even go to their iPads and Macs.

Another example of this was IE's non-standard page rendering standards years ago.

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