K. Ryabitsev
monsieuricon
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@monsieuricon But which of the umpteen not-quite-compatible markdown dialects would we use instead?? Let the bloodbath begin!
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@zev @monsieuricon Are there mail clients supporting some kind of markdown syntax?
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Anton 🇺🇦🇪🇺
atjn@mastodon.online@monsieuricon Why? Every OS has a native webview that you can just import and use as the renderer. Job done, let's spend our resources making a good email client instead of dealing with something that the web has already solved.
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Microsoft realized this at some point -- after a couple of years of non-stop vulnerability reports in Outlook, which is why they made a decision to not use MS Explorer to render email, but switched to using the MS Office html rendering engine, which supported only a small subset of full HTML+CSS functionality. I believe, this is largely true to this day -- if you expect your email to render properly in most clients, you can't write it to the full HTML standard, but to the MS Office stripped down set of features.
If you don't believe me that using HTML for email was a bad idea, check your incoming mail and see how many of the "rich messages" have "Email not displaying properly? View it on our website!" link at the very top of their message.
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Anton 🇺🇦🇪🇺
atjn@mastodon.online@monsieuricon I don't know why email providers use custom engines, but I'm not convinced by your explanation.
Web browsers are extremely secure, and most of their exploits are in script execution, which is disabled in email clients. No matter what engine you use, there will be exploits, which includes the MS Office renderer.
I think it is more likely that it is hard to support emails written for MS Office in a webview, and that's why they use MS Office. To keep backwards compatibility.
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Anton 🇺🇦🇪🇺
atjn@mastodon.online@monsieuricon
You mention that the "Email not displaying properly? View it on our website" link is proof that HTML was a bad idea. I think it shows the exact opposite.
Email is not real HTML, it is a proprietary lookalike made up by MS. And it is so hard to use, that senders will go out of their way to serve you a separate copy in real HTML because that works much better. Clearly MS Office was a bad idea, and everyone agrees that HTML is a good idea.
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