[ryanwaggoner]

Approximately no one outside of HN only wants text emails.

And the argument that anything beyond plain text is a waste and ruins everything applies to literally every single medium out there where the written word is conveyed: webpages, magazines, printed flyers, books, etc. It's laughable to think that all formatting of any kind beyond ASCII is a waste.

If it were up to HN readers, the entire world would be so ugly and boring.

[hollerith]

I love how there are thousands of internet forums, but you're a heavy participant on a forum that is so militantly text-only that emoji are silently removed from user-submitted content. It's almost like the policy you are arguing against has important effects on conversation quality that you don't understand or that you don't want to admit because your paycheck depends on email messages' being rendered as HTML.

>Approximately no one outside of HN only wants text emails.

Approximately no one outside of HN even knows that plain text is a thing distinct from HTML. Among those that do, many probably couldn't give an example from their digital experience of a place where user-submitted content must be plain text. (They can navigate those places just fine, though.)

[haterforhire]

Given how long dang has been claiming that someday we won’t have pagination and everything will be fast, I’m guessing whatever arc garbage runs HN just couldn’t handle emoji 17 years ago or whatever and that’s what we are stuck with.

Basically, I don’t think it’s militantly text-only, it’s just shit.

[memefrog]

This link aggregator (it isn't a forum) would be shit if it allowed emoji.

[kalleboo]

You literally just used italic formatting in your own reply

[hollerith]

It's good to be vigilant against hypocrisy, but there is such a thing as being too focused on possible hypocrisy.

What HN does, i.e., allow comments to contain a couple of carefully-chosen formatting options, is not a realistic option in email whereas because of a history of decades in which email clients could render only plain text, asking email senders to send plain text is a realistic option at least in some situations.

In other words, HN's designers were not restricted to a choice between plain text and full HTML, but in email we basically are (because there is no central authority in charge of email).

[philposting]

Agreed. If things look good then I enjoy looking at them more, and life is to be enjoyed. But more importantly, it's wrong that plain text is always the best way to communicate. A picture is worth a thousand words (often), and a good layout can make things easier to read.

[hattmall]

Ultimately it depends on if it facilities the delivery of information. In most cases excessive styling does the opposite.

[6510]

It's more funny than that. Everyone wants text documents as well as rich documents as well as applications but no one wants a single file type to do all 3.

[reichstein]

They totally do, but there is no single file type which supports all the formatting you might occasionally want, like math or floating text boxes or images, at least no format short of PDF. And which is editable, quotable (important for email, even Gmail keeps messing up quoting parts of numbered lists), efficient, implementable, and not a security liability.

So we keep choosing formats that support the subset of features that our current problem needs. Email multipart messages containing a "safe" subset of HTML has solved some problems adequately, and when it doesn't always work, we include a link to a web page, so you can show it in a real browser, or we attach or embed a PDF.

[6510]

It gets quite hilarious when we take the design goals, technological difficulties both foreseen and experienced, insights picked up, compare the "end" results with the goals and then compare the excuses with what should have been possible technically.

As we cant blame anyone specific, I would have to conclude we did everything wrong and had very poor excuses for it.

A complete embarrassment. I find it rather entertaining but offer no solution.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19258

[postalrat]

Why doesn't HN or reddit or most social media format messages in html like email? Email has been doing it for years. People would love it! Images, colors, tables, etc in every message!

And why not in text messages? Its 2023 guys.

[Kwpolska]

Reddit does support images and tables in comments.