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Comment by rauhl | Hacker News Reader

> How would you support formatted text in email, then?

RFC 1896 specifies text/enriched: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1896

And of course nowadays there is Markdown, which basically codifies a lot of earlier plain-text formatting conventions.

> Please don't say "there shouldn't be formatted text in email." That's not a reasonable position.

I don’t know about that, really. We got by fine with plain text messages for decades, and the formatting conventions were good enough to convey meaning and nuance.

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"We got by" is a bad argument.

Once email was in wide use by the general public, easy formatting was inevitable. HTML was everywhere, and so was the path of least resistance.

I thought it awful at the time, but "at the time" was literally more than two decades ago. HTML email is fine. MOST mail I get, professionally, has some formatting in it now. MOST mail I send probably does, too, to increase what a mentor of mine used to call "scan value."

Could I put all that in a Word doc and email THAT instead? Sure. But that would be a huge pain in the ass.

We got by fine for thousands of years without computers at all

If by fine you mean the life style people had in the 12th century, I’ll pass and stick with computers..

I was making the point that surviving without something in the past or currently is no reason not to improve it.

Improvements are awesome! That’s why I linked to the text/enriched RFC. I really wonder if anyone who downvoted actually read it, or just emotionally reacted.

I don’t think that HTML emails are really an improvement: full-fledged HTML engines bring in too many opportunities for exploits and privacy loss. They definitely add capability, but at too high a cost IMHO.

In general, I think that our industry would benefit from asking ‘can we?’ less and instead asking ‘ought we?’ more.

Can't argue with your final point at all.

However, my thread is more "can we do it differently?" instead of "maybe we shouldn't do it at all"

I agree, HTML isn't right for email.

Some different approach, possibly a markdown variant, with decent style support (basic css like background colours, fonts, like markdown themes in a code editor), why not explore that.

There's no reason emails need to be plain. RTF is a horrible format, markdown is much more prevalent and easy to make a simple UI formatter that obeys the standard for non technical users.

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