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Comment by planetjones | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the reactions are strange at all. Google have a bad track record in implementing things and then abandoning them for one.

I want my email to be a consistent experience - not to get some different behavior if I access through a certain device. Email and its simplicity was universal - I saw the same text on my phone, tablet, laptop and desktop. Will every mail sender who makes use of this, include the JSON and an alternative link to achieve the same result. I think this could get very inconsistent very quickly. Fragmenting email is not something I like the idea of.

For Google Apps customers' internal mails I think this is useful. For the wider Internet I don't like it.

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I see your point, but consistency of email display went out the window with HTML email. We (and Google, and hopefully everybody else providing mail readers) put a ton of work into sanitizing HTML before rendering it in the preview pane. This makes mail display a delicate balance between safety and preserving the sender's intent. It's already a far from trivial problem, and is one of the hundred or so non-obvious reasons why making a mail client isn't easy.

What's nice about what they've done here is that they've required an additional (but now standard) level of authentication for the senders who want to include this richer, more actionable content. And they haven't hardwired this into Google Plus or some other walled garden. That's welcome, IMO.

Has there been any effort to create a standard subset of HTML that is safe for email? Seems like a problem worth solving once for everybody.

Not that I know of, and in fact real-live HTML emails often contain complete gibberish (made-up tags, etc.) that doesn't even validate; we have a bunch of fix-up rules for this stuff.

CSS is a complicating factor as well: some CSS is unsafe and must be stripped, which requires a real (error-tolerant) CSS parser to go along with your real HTML parser.

And identifying remote images: you'd think that was easy right? But do you know how many ways there are to reference a .png image in HTML and CSS?

At one point Facebook emails were even hiding web bugs in BGSOUND tags -- sneaky!

Huh. I would think that the only ones benefiting from the current state of affairs are scammers and spammers, strange that the big players haven't gotten together and done something about it.

When I got dropped into crafting newsletters, I made the mistake of not looking into what different clients support only to find that my beautiful CSS buttons and the majority of the formatting was completely useless.

I agree a standard set of HTML and CSS for email would be a huge benefit.

It was only afterwards that I started noticing most beautiful emails are just sliced images displayed within tables. Thats right, tables.

> Google have a bad track record in implementing things and then abandoning them for one.

Google Reader drama isn't ever going away on HN, is it? The loud minority keep bringing it up regardless of what innovative products Google develops.

> I want my email to be a consistent experience - not to get some different behavior if I access through a certain device.

One decade ago most clients poorly supported HTML email, if at all. It was an inconsistent experience. Understandably it was new technology, so most of us patiently waited until the standard was adopted by email clients.

Same thing here.

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