At 19:31 -0700 02-05-06, Russ Allbery wrote:
It does make sense to recognize that most e-mail is written quickly
without a lot of attention paid to design, and that therefore complex
visual layout languages are frequently inappropriate for e-mail in the
same way that one doesn't generally use FrameMaker to maintain one's
shopping list. Trying to shoehorn normal e-mail into a page design
paradigm seems very wrong to me, and the cause of a lot of the worst of
the brokenness of multipart/alternative as it's seen in the wild.
Writing a neatly formatted text will cause more time for
the sender, but reduce time for the reader. Thus, the
larger the number of recipients is, the more advantageous
it is to format them nicely using HTML.
Many mail messages have only one recipient. In that case,
it is often not worth the effort to format it nicely using
HTML.
Spam messages are intended for millions of readers. That is
why such messages are often in HTML format.
However, also ordinary mail sometimes has more than one
recipient. In such a case, HTML may be suitable. Another
case where HTML is useful is if you want to show something
which cannot be shown in ordinary textual mail, for example
embedded pictures.
I often embed pictures in e-mail. The pictures are copies
of how some web pages looked on my screen, when I am
writing to people trying to get them to modify their user
interfaces.
One case where HTML is useful is for tables. There was a
time, a long time ago, when you could assume that plain
text e-mail was rendered with monospaced fonts. Not any
more. When I send tables requiring monospaced fonts, I mark
it with HTML markup to indicate that it must be monospaced.
I would prefer to use the <pre> tag but the mailer I use
(Macintosh Eudora) does not allow <pre> tags, but it does
allow <font type=Courier> so I use that when I want to send
text which will not look right unless it is shown with a
monospace font.
(Sending HTML tables does not work for many receiving
mailers, so that is not an option yet.)
--
Jacob Palme <jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/jpalme/