Many people consider HTML as spam by definition, as HTML hides the actual message that was sent. HTML have often been miss used for sending malicious links and even JavaScript. Many HTML emails are very poorly written, because they include tables to style pictures and many other things tables shouldn't be used for. This adds to the size of the message often by many KB. The proposal is for DarkMail to use Standardized MarkDown as the default styling language. DarkMail is created by the PGP author and LavaBit.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Darkmail to Use Standardized Markdown as Styling Language
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 64 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday January 05 2015, @05:40PM
Many people consider HTML as spam by definition
Many HTML emails are very poorly written
Because they are almost universally marketing spam.
Do not want.
I suppose they gotta make a buck just like everybody else, and delivering spam might help.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Monday January 05 2015, @05:45PM
Many people consider HTML as spam by definition
Wait til they see what the world wide web's made of.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 5, Interesting) by pkrasimirov on Monday January 05 2015, @06:20PM
I know, right? :) Facebook home page is 4,3+ MB served with 130+ requests. That's in total with images etc. The main HTML page alone is 608 kB. And then all of this proceed to torture the browser. Because it is not actually HTML but JavaScript and the markup is much more than the text.
"War and Peace" [gutenberg.org] in HTML is 3,6 MB.
(Score: 1) by KiloByte on Tuesday January 06 2015, @04:43PM
Well, unlike Facebook, some webpages exist that are not spam.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Monday January 05 2015, @05:55PM
Latex (and ODF) separate content from styling. HTML just mixes them up..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 05 2015, @06:54PM
Sure, because
is separating content from styling, while
is not. </sarcasm>
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday January 05 2015, @10:12PM
Everyone knows there ain't no If sarcasm can be turned off, it is not really sarcasm.
(Score: 2) by CRCulver on Monday January 05 2015, @07:10PM
LaTeX as commonly used does not separate content from styling. \textt, \textsc, etc. are styling tags, not semantic ones. You can try to avoid those tags if you want, but many publishers would prefer you use them and not a more semantic representation. Sure, LaTeX helps ensure a uniform look by offering templates for document sections, tables of contents, and so forth, but it's still not an enforced separation of content and formatting. Docbook XML would be a somewhat better example.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Monday January 05 2015, @05:55PM
I think everyone posting here is going to lock-on to the phrase "Many people consider HTML as spam by definition", because I get the feeling that "many people" means d2xdt2.
Now it is true, the more likely you are to carefully format and present an email, the more likely you are be doing it for pay, and thus the more likely it is to be an ad.
But to just hard classify it like that is lazy. My dentist sending an HTML appointment reminder is tacky and commercial, but it's not spam. Order receipts from Amazon aren't spam either. It can be a symptom of people who can't express themselves through words, but even users of my work software prefer HTML formatted automated email tables to text ones. It's just not 1989 anymore. Usenet isn't how people email.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday January 05 2015, @06:35PM
It can be a symptom of people who can't express themselves through words,
Brevity being the soul of wit, you could have just put the comma after "themselves", and remove what wikipedia calls weasel words replacing "can be" with "is".
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday January 05 2015, @08:20PM
I wrote this in HTML, or at least the HTML being offered by Soylent in the comment editor. How does the use of HTML, for something as simple as an appointment reminder, indicate an inability for one to express themselves through words? I'd like to see this offending reminder.
It's in fact quite useful to express myself beyond simple words [olimex.com] when communicating with some people for projects.
Perhaps we don't mean all HTML, or some fanatical position for pure text only in emails and instant messages? Even with an appointment reminder some styling might be appropriate to bring some details like 1/5 3:30pm @ SadistInYourMouth forward for easy viewing. Not all use cases of HTML are derived from poor marketing copy. I'm glad Darkmail is using some form of styling, since pure text is a bit of an over correction. A little bit of styling can go a long way, and in terms of function and not just form.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by arashi no garou on Monday January 05 2015, @06:56PM
On the other hand, our sales staff uses Quickbooks to process invoices, and when it generates a customer email form it creates the body of the email with plain text and attaches the invoice as a PDF. That is, until the latest version, which now generates a hideous HTML template that tries to mimic the layout of the invoice. It causes each sales rep to spend an extra few minutes converting it back to plain text and stripping out all the unnecessary crap.
I've gone back and forth with Intuit about this, and they claim that it's hardcoded into the the new version and impossible to change. I don't believe them (their reps have a bad habit of lying to get customers off the phone and it only showed up after a point update that followed the new version installation), but I can't find anywhere in the options and settings to disable this behavior. So in this case, adding HTML does nothing but frustrate our sales staff and give me a headache trying to find a workaround. Time is money, and Intuit is costing us money with nothing more than some crappy HTML.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday January 06 2015, @01:53AM
I have on many occasions ceased doing business with a business over their email etiquette.
Even as far as transferring my retirement accounts over this issue.
I still hold email to be a text format, any attachments may be malicious.
I hold that reputable establishments would value their customer to the extent they would not send them packages similar to those used to spread digital disease.
However some businessmen will go ahead and send them and let the customer take the risk of opening it.
And some businessmen won't wash their hands after taking a shit either... In their eyes, their shit doesn't stink.
Just as businessmen size up a prospective employee by observing his etiquette, I size up a business the same way.
Very few impress me.
Most demonstrate a complete lack of concern when it comes to digital hygiene on the internet.
They appear to be ignoramuses having a total lack of concern for their customer. They have already shown their hand - they just want an address to send a bill to, and have demonstrated they could care less about using filthy containers for their sales presentation.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1) by termigator on Tuesday January 06 2015, @05:45AM
Have tried using a text-based browser like w3m or links to auto covert the HTML into plain text? Both browsers support table markup. I've used w3m for years for such purposes.
(Score: 2) by arashi no garou on Tuesday January 06 2015, @12:29PM
That would be just as much work, if not more, than what the sales reps currently do. Intuit generates the email by sending it to Outlook, and from there the reps select Format Text -> Plain Text from the ribbon menu. Then they delete the leftover unwanted text by hand. It basically takes them about half a minute extra to do that once they get the rhythm down, but that's 30 extra seconds for each order that they process. It adds up significantly over the entire day.
I'm looking at using scripting to try to automate that process, but it's a Windows environment so of course it's more difficult. Gotta love broken workflows due to upstream "improvements". Kind of reminds me of a certain system that has come to GNU/Linux lately...
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday January 05 2015, @07:17PM
Whether or not spam is the right word for it could be debated, but it's certainly abuse of the email system.
"It's just not 1989 anymore."
No, it's 1993, and people that cannot be made to understand that email is a text format need to go back to AOL and stay there.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday January 06 2015, @02:22AM
Facebook,Twitter etc is the new AOL and the home of the eternal September....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 05 2015, @11:14PM
"See responses in blue below"
Seen in oh-so-many business emails.
(Score: 1) by termigator on Tuesday January 06 2015, @05:51AM
And this is why plain text in email is still best. Reply quoting semantics are well established with plain text email. With HTML, you get folks using all kinds of crazy and inconsistent methods of incorporating inline comments in a reply. This can make it actually harder to follow a discussion.
Now don't get me started on the major sin of top posting...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 05 2015, @06:02PM
Long ago there were these things called email clients. They offered integrated PGP functionality and it was good.
Then came the 20 yr old know-nothings who exclaimed put it in the browser! Then security completely relied on SSL which was bad all along but it takes time for know-nothings to know-something.
Now we have the father of PGP and the poster child for 4th amendment desecration trying to shoehorn PGP into the cloud.
Why can't we just use Thunderbird+PGP again?
(Score: 1) by linuxrocks123 on Monday January 05 2015, @06:14PM
DarkMail doesn't seem to me at all to be an attempt to shoehorn PGP into the cloud. It seems to be a cross between email, PGP and Tor, and nothing in their design documents indicates to me that it would require a webmail client instead of a standalone one.
My main concern with DarkMail is that, since it's using onion routing anyway, why not just set up email servers inside of Tor and use that instead of reinventing the wheel? If anyone can explain to me why that wouldn't work, I'd appreciate it.
(Score: 2) by CRCulver on Monday January 05 2015, @07:02PM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Monday January 05 2015, @07:13PM
Why can't we just use Thunderbird+PGP again?
The problem is the unseen force that stops widespread encryption of email. Why does Thunderbird need a plugin?
Imagine what the world should look like. Imagine ONE mass deployed mail client that implemented the following system. During initial setup it would look for a keyring and create one if it failed to locate one. It would ask to submit the public key to one or more keyservers. Every message sent would be clear signed and have the public key as an attachment. When receiving such a message it would harvest these public keys and once it has one any future email to that address would be encrypted with it. Once one did it and these keys were commonly seen, other clients would be pressured to implement the same system. Would this system give all of the benefits being discussed with this total rip and replace of email? No, but it would give many of them in a totally compatible way.
Here is the important bit: Notice that even among the Free Software email clients, even on Linux, NONE do anything of the sort. Zero. For all the talk about privacy, zero have actually managed to commit code to do anything about it. It is almost certain that somebody somewhere has tried, something makes it impossible though. Addons are ok since so few will bother, it is the idea of widespread crypto that freaks out the system. Those few who encrypt pretty much just stand out and go straight onto 'the watch list' and being small in number traffic analysis tells almost as much as the message body.
Now if I'm right about an unseen force what does that say about the prospects of a totally new email replacement designed to stop the NSA?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 06 2015, @04:20AM
Notice that even among the Free Software email clients, even on Linux, NONE do anything of the sort.
I think Kontact/KMail does. Except the automatic harvesting. It asks you to verify each key.
If EnigMail is installed before Thunderbird is launched for the first time, it also tries to set you up with a key, but only once, and it is easier to just skip that.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday January 06 2015, @03:33PM
[DIsclaimer: I work for Dovecot now]
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday January 06 2015, @03:39PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Monday January 05 2015, @06:14PM
Obligatory [xkcd.com]
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 05 2015, @06:48PM
> Yay Another Standard!
Markdown has been around for like a decade. It passed the point of being "another" standard long ago. It is actually very handy because it is so simple. It is on the order of using "> " for quoting rather than the <quote> tag.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday January 05 2015, @08:58PM
Actually, I rather dislike Markdown for the same reason that I dislike HTML: It makes things more difficult to read.
I don't have an answer, good or otherwise. In this case they're using Markdown for formatting because it's NOT Turing Complete. It's less so than HTML. And that's intentional.
What I'd like is a system that picks an unusual character, say "\" as meaning "command starting" and having a bunch of sub-commands, such as \b for begin boldface, and \. for "end current set of commands. Allow sets of commands to catenate, so "\biu" could mean start a block of commands that is bold AND italic AND underlined. And some way of building tables that doesn't result in a bunch of blank lines. I don't have an answer to that one yet. I'd really rather NOT allow commands to nest without all nests terminating at the first end-of-command. OTOH, commands should always terminate with a space, which is considered a part of the command. Perhaps they should also always begin with one?
So I *do* want a new standard. One that's extremely flexible, but which doesn't allow recursion or looping, and probably doesn't allow macros or arithmetic. And doesn't allow embedding one file in another. Probably allowing XPM pictures to be recognized by the system is also a bad idea, but I'm not totally sure, and perhaps they could be added by an optional post-process. (Were I to write the system, graphics would NOT be a part of it, but if it's totally ignorable and doesn't increase the computational power of the system I've nothing really against it.)
If I ever finish designing what I want I may implement it, as it would be trivial to translate it into a small subset of HTML.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 05 2015, @10:07PM
I want a new standard - one that won't make me sick,
One that won't make me crash my car, or make me feel three feet thick.
I want a new standard - one that won't hurt my head,
One that won't make my mouth too dry, or make my eyes too red.
One that won't make me nervous, wonderin' what to do.
One that makes me feel like I feel when I'm with you,
when I'm alone with you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 05 2015, @11:33PM
Congrats. You basically reinvented RTF.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 05 2015, @11:35PM
I would rather be mauled by bears than volunteer for writing any form of text formatting system. I have developed a grudging tolerance for existing systems and I've come to accept that their general awfulness is due to the general awfulness of the requirements imposed on them.
You want to start a limited scope text formatting system? That's what the last guy said too. It's been nice knowing you.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Arik on Monday January 05 2015, @07:13PM
It's a wonderful thing. It's easy to work with, both humans and machines can read it with no problem. It never tries to lock you into a proprietary tool, and it does not conceal malware. And it's *very* easy to /emphasize/ words and to _underline_ your _points_.
The OP got one thing wrong - it's not that HTML specifically is spam, it's that _anything_ other than *text* is spam. And that's being polite.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 05 2015, @08:02PM
Bravo you have mastered markdown
(Score: 2) by Foobar Bazbot on Monday January 05 2015, @08:26PM
You do know your <tt> tag isn't text, right? Since you consider it spam, please stop spamming us.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Monday January 05 2015, @11:19PM
Unless some browsers are now interpreting standard plaintext "styling" as code (are they?) or the message requires monospace fonts in order to align everything perfectly, he shouldn't need to use .
(This next part isn't targeting you, it's a general gripe.)
I hate how basic HTML styling commands imply increasing cluelessness with each new version. Eliminating "b" and "i" in favor of "strong" and "em" was bad enough, but adding "tt" to indicate preformatted text presumably because some nitwit didn't realize that monospaced text isn't necessarily in a typewriter-like font...bleah.
Then again, considering the number of users even on geek sites that react to monospaced text with, "omg liek dont use that typewriter font its ugly," unaware of how to set their browser's font preferences or how basic punctuation works, I suppose I should hate the increasingly popular belief that ignorance is something to be proud of.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 06 2015, @12:59AM
It appears that you used gt and lt "markup" and that that looked OK in your preview.
It then got nuked when you posted.
Apparently, you specified Plain Old Text as the markup method (the default).
There is an Allowed HTML section below the dialogs that calls out which markup tags are acceptable.
If you need something else, e.g. nbsp, you need to make a different selection.
N.B. To see the effect of the quote tag requires one to download a stylesheet (which I don't).
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by gidds on Tuesday January 06 2015, @01:46PM
Actually, that bit makes some sense. Visual effects like 'bold' and 'i(talic)' really belong in CSS, which is about the visual appearance of the page; 'strong' and 'em(phasis)' are more suitable for modern HTML as they're closer to describing the semantic meaning of the text. (Though perhaps not as much as e.g. 'title' or 'foreign' might be.)
Similarly, 'tt' (for 'teletype') is a visual effect, while 'code' is semantic.
(Not that either was really justified here.)
[sig redacted]
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday January 05 2015, @07:43PM
Markdown is good for writing text. But if you want any kind of organization more complex than a list then you can't use markdown. Want and image and then some text to the right of it? Can't do that. I'm totally cool with having a markdown mimetype though, that would be sweet. I'd support that going into every email client!
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday January 05 2015, @11:01PM
Attach a PDF if it's a formal document or letter, or just include a link or attach the picture otherwise.
No one needs auto-loading of god knows what you included in the html. If I want to see the picture I can click the link or attachment, easy.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by nukkel on Monday January 05 2015, @07:45PM
... would like to see a scantily-clad picture of Miss Used!
(Score: 3, Funny) by Fnord666 on Monday January 05 2015, @10:37PM
I for one would like to see a scantily-clad picture of Miss Used!
In ASCII art format of course.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 05 2015, @09:09PM
This looks like the lovechild of markup languages (XML, HTML) and Python. One whitespace difference (think transmission problem / corruption) and your page turns to toast. At least HTML is a bit more resilient.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday January 05 2015, @11:05PM
What decade are you living in? TCP/IP hasn't randomly corrupted data for a long time already, barring malicious activity or physical infrastructure damage. Also, data corruption will screw up HTML even worse than it would markdown; one missing right angle bracket and the whole document is toast. Yes, robust HTML parsers can recover from the damage, but Markdown, comparatively, is self-correcting.
The only real danger to whitespace is incorrectly configured programs and Windows, which, sad to say, are all to common in our uneducated population.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 05 2015, @10:31PM
I can see no license mentioned on the web page or in the code repository...
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday January 05 2015, @10:40PM
Though still an improvement over html, Markdown's syntax is really inefficient. Maybe TeX or a reduced version (say, one that settles on feature parity with Markdown) could be used instead?
compiling...
(Score: 1) by m2o2r2g2 on Monday January 05 2015, @11:36PM
HTML have often been miss used for sending malicious links... Many HTML emails are very poorly written
Many HTML article summaries too it seems.
(Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Tuesday January 06 2015, @01:56AM
This! Yes! ^^^^^
Seriously folks, arguing against HTML email is about as useful as arguing about that newfangled thang called "television."
The boat has sailed. It's done. It ain't turning back.
And that's coming from a guy who actually really prefers plain text e-mail.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday January 06 2015, @02:30AM
People that can express them self in ASCII tends to have important things to say. If formatting is necessary it's usually an indication of a mind obsessed with style and not content. I know there's a lot of idiots. It makes it all more worthwhile to skip them.
At least in USA most things on TV seems to be bullshit. So no loss.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by tftp on Tuesday January 06 2015, @02:54AM
I'm using HTML email format for all business communication within the company. It is required because:
I guess I could use plain text for some emails. But that gives no benefit, as the message size is not a concern, and people don't even have access to the message's source. This whole thread is debating a ship that has sailed more than a decade ago. HTML content is here, it is actively used by most people, and there is a good reason to use it. Whining about tables is not very productive if you want a table. Either it is a true table of numbers and things, or it is a layout tool - whatever it is, tables work just fine. If someone objects to "improper" use of or inline images then I'd like to know what compatible alternatives are available in a plain text format. After all, it's computers for people and not the other way around.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday January 06 2015, @03:16AM
Seems you are using it in a rational way, I really don't have problem with that. Your message needs html (kind of). The problem is when the message is crap and is html-ized to attempt to manipulate your mind or pitch.
I guess the problem comes when Outlook and other stuff blasts unnecessary and bloated large chunks of html tags.
However it might be relevant to ask for permission to use html. At least some of the tags should deemed "hostile". There's also the issue of inline tracking using https // imagehost / message1234 / tracking-id-79837493.jpg with perhaps a buffer overrun image to add.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Tuesday January 06 2015, @03:40AM
Office 2010 (and perhaps even earlier releases) blocks images in messages, unless allowed on case by case basis, or per sender, or per domain. I receive ads from a few online stores that I regularly deal with. I could unsubscribe, but in reality these messages are useful to me and I want to receive them. I allowed automatic download of images for those senders. They already know my email because that's what I use to buy stuff from them; and I don't care if they know when I read their messages.
At work we are sent a bunch of spam... but not a single one passes through our mail filters. We use GFI MailEssentials, and I placed a few most persistent spammers into a global blacklist. I have also graylist enabled - that one feature kills 90% of the spam. I also use RBLs. Mail on my private domain does not have a filter, except RBLs and a very small (14 lines) /etc/postfix/header_checks; still, I do not receive any spam there either. I guess, even spammers don't want to talk to me :-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 06 2015, @05:29AM
Your message needs html (kind of)
Not at all.
Put the images on a server and include the URLs in your TEXT message.
Filling up someone else's inbox with hundreds of megabytes when 10kB would handle it is simply wrong.
...and people were making bulletpoint lists on typewriters before computers or HTML existed.
Tables? Yeah, that is an actual proper application of HTML.
-- gewg_
(Score: 1) by tftp on Wednesday January 07 2015, @06:08AM
How would you ensure security in this arrangement? Business-related images are not to be read by just anyone. Email access is authenticated by Outlook, and by VPN, and may be protected by encryption of the HDD - but how to ensure security of those links? You want people to log into a domain - perhaps somebody else's domain and server - with their work credentials? That's a perfect phishing expedition, for obvious reasons. HTML email solves all these problems, as the message body and inline images or attachments arrive in one secure package, and the worker does not need to click on various links in email (isn't it what we teach people to NOT DO ?)
Sorry, but I run the server and I establish quotes. Very liberal quotes. Why do you insist on 10 kB in the days of multi-terabyte drives for $50-70 retail? What is the purpose of saving bytes that cost you nothing and wasting time of your workers, who are the most expensive resource in any business? Plain text purists lost the war two decades ago.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday January 07 2015, @02:56PM
Must be nice. Except for the people you email. First, I still know mail providers with 10 meg quotas. Great that you set such liberal quotas, but surely you sometimes email people who aren't on your own server.
Secondly...I have what I'd consider a reasonable quota on my work mail, 240MB. That fills up in two days for me -- forget going on vacation, I can't even leave for a *weekend* without my mailbox filling up and rejecting messages. I usually get a few dozen mails per day that are over 2MB in size, with no images, no attachments. Just ~50KB of text wrapped in an obscene amount of HTML...
(Score: 1) by tftp on Wednesday January 07 2015, @06:09PM
This is why I said in my first message: "I'm using HTML email format for all business communication within the company." This means that I do not send too much stuff to external people, unless they need that stuff and I know that they can receive it. Email within the company is nearly free, as the cost of sending 100 kB or 1 MB does not differ from sending 1 kB.
Without knowing your business I can't say for sure, but my first guess would be that you are paid to receive this mail. As your business is paying for delivery and storage of all this, it's not exactly something you need to worry about - except, perhaps, mentioning it once to the people in charge. If they don't feel concerned, leave it be. 120 MB per day on a LAN is hardly something that an IT manager would lose his sleep over. Cables don't care, and servers are cheap. This load is not even visible to the IT, dwarfed by network shares.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday January 07 2015, @08:18PM
Oh yeah, bandwidth and space is cheap as hell, that's not the problem. My concern is that I wind up spending at least an hour per day cleaning out my damn inbox. And yeah, they're paying me for it, so I don't mind too much, but by cutting back on HTML email they could probably save thousands of man-hours per year...
(Score: 1) by tftp on Wednesday January 07 2015, @10:03PM
In my experience the DELETE key works equally fast on small and on large emails :-) What takes time is reading of those emails - but as I'm not reading them raw, there is no visible difference to me :-) Furthermore, indents and separators and formatting help me quickly understand what is and what is not important - it makes my work easier.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by termigator on Tuesday January 06 2015, @06:08AM
My argument against HTML in email is a security one. HTML email is a security nightmare. One could argue that is due to MUA vendors using browser rendering engines for rendering HTML (and all the unneeded baggage), but why use a language well known to facilitate attacks against message recipients.
HTML email is also a security problem for software and services that provide web-based email services.
The other sin is the bloat. Ever looks at the raw HTML generated my MUAs like Outlook. The noise ratio is very high. Many may think bloat does not matter anymore, but it is sloppy design and is a problem when data usage is metered or capped.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Tuesday January 06 2015, @05:58AM
Simplified HTML (no Javascript, no CSS, no inline styling) is actually what we need. It allows formatting, but the user would retain control of how it is formatted. No such "html reader" product exists today, however.
Markdown modifies text. Tabs are automatically expanded to 4 spaces [commonmark.org]. Dashes are converted to lists [commonmark.org]. Astrisks, dashes, and underscores are converted to horizontal lines [commonmark.org]. In other words, Markdown is modifying the text that I have written and any character I type may trigger this. And the Markdown specs (which is really long) has a lot of triggers. That makes it hard to debug for the common user.
To make matters worse, it's Markdown + HTML [commonmark.org] -- in other words, Markdown allows use of HTML codes in addition to just "simple Markdown". You have to be a programmer to properly wield all of this. And we want mother-in-law (who barely can surf the web) to understand this?
HTML allows me, the content creator, to specify what I want to convey information. It uses only two characters (the less than and greater than sign) as the "mark up identifier". And it's already well known. A good reader would have good default settings but also allows the reader to specify how he wants those tags to be presented in final form -- if the reader wants them presented at all.
(My personal opinion is that a good language should have only one marker. My personal preference is the backslash, but I think HTML is already too well ingrained in the common public.)
What tags should be allowed? An excellent start would be what Soylent News allows when writing comments. Also allowing for embedding pictures and videos and you're off to a really good start for a great reader. Again, the user would retain complete control how every tag is viewed. Simple, elegant, and not complicated at all.
(Score: 1) by termigator on Tuesday January 06 2015, @06:12AM
I have no problem with markdown if it is identified with the proper MIME type in the Content-Type header field.
If markdown processing is triggered for text/plain email, that is a bad idea.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Tuesday January 06 2015, @04:13PM
In some ways I disagree with you, but I think you make an excellent point. My preferences are not necessarily your preferences, but there is room for both. There is no reason why email readers and writers couldn't handle handle both.
My main disagreement to your view is that I'd like to see power come back to the content consumer instead of putting all the formatting in the hands of the content creator. My opinion not only includes emails, but websites as well.
(Score: 1) by Gobo on Tuesday January 06 2015, @06:50AM
There is no such thing as "Standardized Markdown": https://twitter.com/markdown/status/507341395137658880 [twitter.com]
There is only a 'A strongly specified, highly compatible implementation of Markdown' (http://commonmark.org), which is not endorsed by the creator of Markdown.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 06 2015, @09:02AM
The referenced page says:
There should be a bit reserved to tell if the message is CommonMark or plain text to avoid the client have to guess how to decode the message.
Given that we already have the 'Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed' hack, I've been toying with the idea to convert incoming
'text/html' in to markdown, tagged as 'Content-Type: text/plain; markup=markdown'. I guess something similar could be used
as the above mentioned 'bit reserved'.
Derek