I use either plain text of rich text format, but sometimes when people respond to my emails I find that they’ve been converted to HTML format. I find it annoying, because while the response itself looks fine, it does bad things to the extended email trail, generally in the form of narrow columns (due to increasing indents) and wider line spacing. In a long email trail, the bottom emails can be rendered unreadable, which is a problem if I need to save the email exchange and don’t want to save multiple emails.
Question is why people/programs do this? What advantages are there in HTML formatting that you can’t get from rich text? And is there a way to undo it, i.e. to reconvert it and lose all the HTML features without losing the entire format (in going to plain text)?
My speculation would be to blame web-based mail access, like Outlook Web Access or GMail.
HTML is the native markup, so anything done in a non-HTML markup would be translated to HTML for display. Responses would also be in HTML because of the simple bias towards it.
As I said, speculation. I prefer to generate and send/receive email in straight ASCII.
Why not lose the entire format? Why mess with so-called rich text? It’s not any better.
Good email software will certainly at least have a setting to strip away that trash (both “rich” and HTML) and leave you with normal email to respond to. If your email doesn’t let you do this, your email isn’t good - change it.
That goes too far, because then (basically) only people who speak English are allowed to have email. Some form of Unicode makes a lot more sense. Still “just plain typing”, but anyone’s language will work.
The TLDR is that HTML IS a form of “rich text”. Rich text isn’t a specific format (unless you’re talking about .RTF), it just means formatted plain text – which HTML qualifies as.
Email, being the ancient protocol that it is, originally had to be plain text. HTML is still just plain text, with the markup understood by special clients. For historical reasons, when email first started getting rich text, HTML was chosen by some of the email clients as the go-to format, and it just kinda snowballed from there, gaining widespread but unofficial support. Thus, HTML became the de facto standard for rich text email. In hindsight, it was quite fortunate that this became the case, since HTML became the unified language of the new Internet, simultaneously propelling the Web and email to become the most popular services.
The Internet was never designed for a global population of 7 billion, with different linguistic and formatting needs. It’s a hobbled-together hack on top of jury-rigged prototypes running on academic proofs of concept, and while it isn’t “optimal”, it’s what we have. Most weirdnesses with its technologies can be explained best by “it just came to be this way, and by the time we realized it wasn’t good enough, it was too late to change everything all at once, so we just had to keep going and try to sneak in this one small hack…”. HTML email is one of those hacks. These days, if you want rich text without going through the email protocol, you just roll your own (IMs, Facebook Messenger, etc.). Whichever format underlies them is mostly irrelevant to the end user… email is a special mess because it was a relatively grassroots effort with a bunch of incompatible clients and HTML renderers, and it’s quite miraculous that it still works, as it is (and it doesn’t always, such as trying to send a mobile-friendly HTML email that works across different screen ratios and resolutions).
Blah blah blah. It is this way because it started this way and nobody was powerful enough to change it before it was too late. For this to change, you either have to go back in time and propose a similarly open and popular encoding for rich text, or else convince all the major players today (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo) to support your new standard that replaces HTML. Nobody is going to do that.
But HTML email is not going to go away, if only because businesses use them for advertisement and tracking and most don’t bother including plain text versions anymore.