4 thoughts on “E-mail is Not a Platform for Design”

  1. I refuse to send ASCII.

    It doesn’t allow me to use proper document formatting conventions or even use a complete set of typographic and international characters.

    I would sooner read and write longhand than read monospaced text full of inappropriate line breaks.

    And yes, it chaps my hide that Outlook 2007 reformats all HTML into word documents before they display.

    But I am too fond of Georgia and Garamond to go back.

  2. Further:

    Email is not Chat. That’s what IM and IRC and SMS are for.

    It bothers me that people are not able to write letters any more.

  3. But, you see, if everyone sent as just straight ASCII, then the recipient could set their display preferences to view the email in whatever font/size/weight they chose.

    Proper document formatting conventions… where to start? Remember that mail part in email — your lament about letters? Traditional letters had the date, salutation, body, closing, and signature. That’s it. Business letters added a couple extra things, but really they still fit the above model. It was all done in plain text (or longhand), no fonts, no colors, no frills. Think of it as pre-ASCII.

    I’ve long said that if you can’t get your point across with plain text, you need to learn to write better.

  4. Yeah, I’ve rethought my arguments aplenty since posting.

    My primary quarrel is with the premise that effective communication and design are mutually exclusive. They are not.

    I agree that your message ought to carry equal weight whether formed in monospaced text or in gorgeous typography.

    My favorite MacOS RSS reader allows the application of custom style-sheets, so I do like your idea.

    I also realize that my use of ASCII for an example was inflammatory, as many commonly used monospaced fonts or typefaces have a reasonable number of international and typographic characters.

    But this does bring me back to document formatting. There are differences in the ways various clients interpret linefeed and carriage returns, for example, and this continues to be problematic in email when conversations include several people and forwards or includes. (Don’t get me started on email etiquette issues)

    But I do feel strongly that the best way currently to represent document formatting in the most portable fashion is with markup of some type: HTML, XML, or SGML— and modern typography.

    Admission:

    During middleschool, I stopped writing longhand. I had begun writing simple algorithms in Applesoft BASIC on Apple ][ computers that were not capable of displaying lower-case text.
    I was enamored of the simplicity and the clarity. And my longhand was atrocious. And it let me skirt capitalization issues entirely. ;)

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