[radarsat1]

I really wish the email standard was markdown instead of HTML.

I only ever switch from text-only when I need to embed an image, and otherwise occasionally italics or whatever is useful. This could be taken care of with a basic markdown-like language, and avoid getting full HTML advertisements, etc. I really, really don't need your newsletter to be properly formatted in my mailbox, just send a link, I'll open it in the browser if I want to.

[koolba]

Or how about just disallowing all remote content. Sure marketers wouldn’t be able to track “opens” anymore but I don’t care and I doubt the average person would want that either if they were educated on how it all works.

[captn3m0]

If Google really wanted to make the web fast, they would add native support for text/markdown mimetype in Chrome and ask publishers to just create .md files instead.

[andrewshadura]

text/markdown is a bad idea because it's not backwards compatible. It should be text/plain; markup=markdown, since Markdown is perfectly readable without any software support.

See https://blog.freron.com/2011/thoughts-on-writing-emails-usin... for more thoughts on this topic.

[stephenr]

backwards compatible with what? In my experience anything served as `text/*` that isn’t more specifically handled (eg `text/html`) will be rendered as text/plain because the type is still `text`.

Edit: rendered, not tendered

[captn3m0]

Thanks for the link. I get that this would help with emails, but pushing markdown into text/plain wouldn't be helpful for web content on browsers.

The web already has Content Negotiation to let older clients prefer html or plain text content.