couple of quick points, but first a joke: Spoken like a true operations guy :p (tongue-in-cheek, rimshot)
1) I wonder if you'd be in the room as Tim Burners-Lee was inventing the IMG element, describing to him the security implications and why it's a nonviable component from a support perspective. I wonder if you would describe his new invention as also "bad for the world" just because it has implications for you job?
2) The technology is already built. Slapping a common modern rendering engine into your email client with your own custom tweaks is just so easy. A quarter of your job is already done.
3) As I said, you're not living in reality. I completely understand your workflow, because it mirrors my own (right down to the Evernote detail).
However, you're just a minor subset in the holistic view of the email ecosystem. There is real pressure from stakeholders and users for great looking email. There are entire industries whose only job is to make email look nice. And yes, even beyond the table of geniuses in the Marketing department, there is actual value in nice-looking email.
I also take it that you've never sat in a meeting with Marketing where they are asking "why can't our email just look like our website??". And then you think about it, and you realize it's an entirely reasonable question.
4) If you're doing it right, you are sending a plain-text version alongside your HTML version. In my view, it's a necessity.
5) Your searching for a string point is moot. It's not a strict text-only search that is impeded by HTML directives, it's exceedingly trivial for rendering engines to figure out how to search for Strings while ignoring intervening markup.
6) Why do you, and so many who think like you, believe that email should always be the bastard step-child of the web? Honest question.
>Your searching for a string point is moot. It's not a strict text-only search that is impeded by HTML directives, it's exceedingly trivial for rendering engines to . . .
It might be exceedingly trivial in theory, but in practice what happened on the web is that those "style: fixed" elements that remain in the same position within the window when you scroll often (usually?) obscure the string you are searching for when you use "find-in-page (i.e., Edit > Find). In other words, when "fixed" elements or whatever their proper name is were implemented, the browser makers did not do the work to make sure that users can still see hits when the users is using find-in-page.
Moreover, a few years before the introduction of fixed elements, find-in-page started to mystify me during searches by landing on (what I guess are) invisible occurrences of the search-for string.
What is your point, other than pedantic nonsense? Who cares that email came before TBL's WWW. In terms of current support for modern technologies, as proselytized by everyone's favorite web consortium (W3C), email clients' support is abysmal. If you want to pretend that the first agent to a system will always have the best solution, through virtue of chronology, be my guest. It's a silly and losing proposition.
1) I wonder if you'd be in the room as Tim Burners-Lee was inventing the IMG element, describing to him the security implications and why it's a nonviable component from a support perspective. I wonder if you would describe his new invention as also "bad for the world" just because it has implications for you job?
2) The technology is already built. Slapping a common modern rendering engine into your email client with your own custom tweaks is just so easy. A quarter of your job is already done.
3) As I said, you're not living in reality. I completely understand your workflow, because it mirrors my own (right down to the Evernote detail).
However, you're just a minor subset in the holistic view of the email ecosystem. There is real pressure from stakeholders and users for great looking email. There are entire industries whose only job is to make email look nice. And yes, even beyond the table of geniuses in the Marketing department, there is actual value in nice-looking email.
I also take it that you've never sat in a meeting with Marketing where they are asking "why can't our email just look like our website??". And then you think about it, and you realize it's an entirely reasonable question.
4) If you're doing it right, you are sending a plain-text version alongside your HTML version. In my view, it's a necessity.
5) Your searching for a string point is moot. It's not a strict text-only search that is impeded by HTML directives, it's exceedingly trivial for rendering engines to figure out how to search for Strings while ignoring intervening markup.
6) Why do you, and so many who think like you, believe that email should always be the bastard step-child of the web? Honest question.