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Mike Stockman wondered: <<Just out of curiosity, is there really a clear
advantage to sending out an HTML-formatted e-mail vs. sending a short,
catchy, bulleted plain-text summary of the newsletter with a link to your
site?>>
Well, in my case it keeps the boss happy, and that's a pretty darn
compelling advantage. <g> The only real advantage in my eyes is that
plain-text newsletters are often harder to read, and look really amateurish
in this day and age--to the point that I really, really have to be
interested in the subject to force myself to read such newsletters nowadays.
For us, as a research institute trying to give the impression that we're
ahead of the curve (which we are), looking modern is not a trivial issue.
Moreover, should we choose to include images, it's easier to do in HTML than
plain text. HTML also goes naturally onto our Web site, where we eventually
plan to archive the newsletters.
I don't think any of these advantages makes HTML a really good choice; where
appearance is important, PDF is far superior because (among other things)
you can actually control the typography to improve legibility and produce a
printable version for the (hopefully many) readers who want to actually read
the thing and prefer to print it out. It also goes up on the Web just fine,
and will work for pretty much anyone who has Acrobat Reader.
<<The trouble with HTML e-mail is that, because there's no standard among
mail readers, what looks good in Outlook can look like garbage in Eudora,
Netscape Mail, etc. It's challenging, but not impossible, to design Web
pages that meet the standard and look good in all major browsers; adding
mail readers to the mix makes it impossible.>>
I'm in full agreement; among other things, those of us who read our mail
offline lose the images in HTML mail because the link to the image server
isn't available. My original idea was to send the newsletter as an HTML
attachment designed to work as well as possible in any browser (one reason I
want to do it in Dreamweaver), but that wasn't accepted. All I can say in
our defence is that the vast majority of our clients do use Outlook (we've
asked), and that we'll happily reformat the newsletter for any who complain.
--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
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