[tzs]

> Email is a text medium

That fight was doomed from the moment it got named "email". With that name people were going to expect "email" to be like postal mail but online.

With postal mail we can use any fonts and styles and colors that we can put on paper by hand or that our word processors can put on paper. We can include graphs and tables and images. We can even send files by putting them on physical media that is small enough to fit in our envelope.

And so it was pretty much inevitable that email would get the ability to handle all that too, as soon as both of these conditions came to pass: (1) the Internet became widespread in the general population and (2) common office and home computers became sufficiently capable to reasonably handle fancy documents.