- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
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Rich text features desirable for end users include things like inline images, bold or italicized text, and so on. However, the tradeoff isn’t worth it. Images can simply be attached to your email, and you can employ things like asterisks, /slashes/, underscores, or UPPERCASE for emphasis. You can still communicate your point effectively without bringing along all of the bad things HTML emails come with.
It seems like it would be considered unprofessional to have unformatted links, referenced images that my correspondent must go out of their way to see, and underscores/asterisks/uppercase used for emphasis. The thing is that people expect emails to be formatted as if you were going to print them out as letters and mail them.
Most of the points listed on this website are related to security and privacy. While security and privacy are important, I can’t accept the trade them for my professionalism.
The one really good point on this website that I like is about accessibility. I like that plaintext emails are easier to read using a screen reader or a braille terminal. However, most people I send emails to do not use a screen reader or braille terminal.
Markdown provides all the formatting I really need with simple syntax. I think it’s the best of both worlds, and I really wish markdown emails existed.
Can’t one just use Markdown syntax on a plaintext email? After that it is up to the client to render it as HTML with matkup. Though I agree with your point that it isn’t commonplace.
Well, like you said, most clients don’t render Markdown. So, there’s not much of a point in using it if you know it won’t render correctly.
I think at one point I used a thunderbird plugin where you could write emails in markdown, but it would just convert them to html, since no email clients are expecting to read markdown.
