I’m not a huge fan of email generally; it usually means ‘work’, as Mr Briggs noted following Barcamp, and I’ve argued about previously. In my mind, spam has discredited email as a marketing mechanism. But a lot of large corporate clients still think in email terms, and it isn’t going away any time soon.
So it’s with some relief that I note, among the list of improvements planned for the Blackberry platform in 2008, is:
‘HTML and Rich Text Email Rendering – BlackBerry smartphone users will be able to view HTML and rich text email messages with original formatting preserved including font colors and styles, embedded images, hyperlinks, tables, bullets and other formatting.’
If you’ve never used or worked with Blackberry, you’ll be shocked at just how badly it handles HTML email (as I described in an article for BT last year). So on the face of it, this sounds like good news, and will be widely welcomed – although naturally we’ll have to see how it pans out.
I’ve always been against HTML e-mail, initially because of bandwidth but mainly because of presentational issues. But there are moves afoot to sort out the mess. Check out the Email Standards Project at http://www.email-standards.org.
Interestingly, no mention of the BlackBerry platform.
Some of the same issues are seen on ‘Smartphones’ or your Windows Mobile devices. Though would rasterised text be viable at such small sizes? Flash on mobile devices? iPhone? Hmmm.