the (un)real thoughts of realbt

Much controversy surrounds the plain text vs. HTML email debate. And apart from the ideological debate (which consumes most of the debate), there are a number of technical problems (which translate into usability issues) that arise from either type.

Let’s start with the introduction of mobile devices: PDAs, cell phones, wireless email toys, BlackBerries, etc. These came long after the plain-text days of Pine. Typically these do not handle richtext formatting. When email is sent as HTML (and when the email client behaves properly), a plaintext copy of the original message is included in the envelope. This ensures that clients not capable of handling the HTML content are able to read the email in its simplest form.

This should work for mobile devices too, right? Well, sure. If they’re built smart enough to ignore the HTML content and go straight for the plain-text version, that’s great. But that still means that the envelope is 100-150% larger than it would be with just the plain text message. While this isn’t a problem for anyone on a broadband connection, you want to be able to download and read your email on your wireless device as fast as possible. You shouldn’t need to download wasted garbage that won’t be touched anyway.

What about office workers and non-technical staff? Anyone that’s familiar with the pre-Outlook days of email can recognise the non-technical staff person using Outlook in an office environment. If you’re used to using Word, it comes as a surprise to find out that email was never intended to cary richtext. Plain text — what’s that? What do you mean I can’t bold that word? This is a huge usability problem and email really hasn’t provided an elegant solution (unless you consider HTML mail “elegant”).

To these users, it only makes sense that one should be able to compose email using all the same features afforded by a dumb word processor. Unfortunately, the deeper understanding of email and its history just aren’t in the minds of most IT workers anymore, and therefore users don’t understand it either. And why should they have to? Email was never meant to be a complex application. Nor should it be.

For Hotmail users and 75% of the wired world, reply methods means nothing. But it is a huge deal. It’s been the cause of many flamewars over the years. Quoted or outlined; quoting and nested; top replies and bottom replies. What is all this? In the good-old plain-text days, text was quoted with a greater-than sign followed by a space (”> “). One then replied to the entire content (or however much of it the replying author wished to quote) below, such that the email thread read like a conversation. It was very intuitive.

But then software makers started defaulting the reply position above the quoted text. This meant that you had to read the email upside down in reverse in order to re-read the thread. Somewhat less intuitive than bottom-reply (discussed above), but this quickly became the norm with Hotmail and the like.

Then along came HTML mail, which became a hybrid of Microsoft Word and top-replies. This was the end of plain-text.

So what’s better? They all have their merits, of course. Usability, it’s nice to be able to bold text in an email without using special characters to highlight a word. It starts to seem cumbersume and very old-school to train a new office worker to use underscores to make a word appear underlined.

Ultimately, it’s become one big mess of usenet flaming, Outlook HTML abuse, and ill-conceived forking of confirmity. One thing for certain: nothing is going to change. On one hand, it would be nice of the world could abandon plain-text, and everyone move to pure richtext (no, not HTML). But the support isn’t there, and it adds to the bulk on mobile devices. It also makes bottom-replies near impossible; at the very least incredibly awkward. And switching entirely to plain-text seems very 1960s of us. In a world of camera phones and RFID tracking, it feels very backward.

It’s a perfect example of human usability, technical standards and habits, and lack of a plan from the non-Microsofties in the world. Email was never meant to be a complex application.