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Email Luddism

Here’s a little rant I’ve been meaning to get out for a while.

Whenever the subject of email client support of some particular email feature comes up, someone always posts a comment to the tune of “HTML doesn’t belong in email anyway, all email should be plain text”. What they’re saying is that they outright reject two important features: MIME and progressive enhancement. Given that MIME is what makes attachments (or any arbitrary binary data, attached or not) possible, I guess they can live without them too. It’s the same technology that allows web servers to identify content types, so while we’re painting with his particularly tarry brush, I guess we should remove CSS, javascript and images from HTML pages as well. That should keep them happy. With all those removed, we can all retreat to the comfort of the command line where our needs will be served admirably by the likes of the wonderful (no joke) elinks.

The whole point of the multipart/alternative data type is progressive enhancement. A client is free to select from the alternatives presented and render as best it can, with an option for manual selection (that is, as long as you don’t use Outlook which doesn’t believe in such things). This applies to the common text/plain > text/html combo as much as it would to text/plain > image/jpeg, or perhaps application/pdf > application/vnd.sun.xml.writer. Now if they restricted their comments to text/html only, I might have some sympathy, as that’s just shoddy behaviour on the part of the sender. However, they usually prefer to throw out the baby with the bath water.

To conclude: MIME is a wonderful thing; some people use it badly; get over it.

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PHPLondon

PHPLondon08 was quite a success. I really enjoyed it, met lots of great people.

The talks were generally good (I’ll get to mine!). The only downer I thought was that there was really quite a bit of overlap between Ivo’s intro and Mike & Scott’s one immediately after it, though both were good in their own right (and I liked Ivo’s bricks analogy).

Mine went mostly ok, but I got the timing completely wrong, spent far too long on the first half, and I’d not even reached halfway through the second half when I spotted Richard (the room manager) holding up the “1 minute remaining” sign – I’d completely forgotten about time allocated for questions! That said, after being really quite nervous beforehand (which is generally unlike me!), I found it pretty easy once I got going, though taking it too easy is probably what made it take too long. Despite all that, there were plenty of good questions asked (no tumbleweed effect!), and I got some great compliments. Someone even said it had been their best talk of the day, so I must have been doing something right.

The slides are linked below, and I’ll also try to record audio of the bits I didn’t get to, as otherwise my talk’s MP3 will have a rather feeble ending!

A real surprise appeared just before Derick’s excellent keynote – a combination of PHP history and best-practice – three guys from PHP Barcelona invited me to speak at their conference in September! I think it’s kind of provisional, but it was very flattering to be asked!

I mentioned in the talk, and talked to various people, about writing an email book. One point came up that led me to think that there should be a guide for marketers – there simply isn’t any good, accessible information on what’s legal and what’s not, and practical advice about what they should ask of their email service provider in implementing marketing campaigns.

For those who want them, here are PDFs of my talk(s):

FYI, I ground to a halt on slide 13 of 28 in the second one.