These guidelines by Headstar for text email newsletters look very useful.
Much of what is in them could be applied to email in general.
These guidelines by Headstar for text email newsletters look very useful.
Much of what is in them could be applied to email in general.
It is a useful standard as it will work for the visually impaired – however it makes for rather bland looking newsletters. (sadly)
NewsScan Daily
http://www.newsscan.com/newsscan/newscup.html
For example does not comply because of the repeated asterixes.
I’d like to see a ‘Newsletter Server’ which took content in xml and could produce a whole pile of formats including the TEN for visually impaired.
Walter, that begs the question … what is the purpose of a newsletter?
Is it to provide useful information to the widest audience possible (within the niche of the newsletter), or is it to look pretty? I get a lot of newsletters via email, and while the prettied up ones in HTML look nice, they’re usually terrible in the choice of information organisation. For one thing, plain text newsletters usually let you determine within the first few sentences if you want/need to read them, while HTML newsletters often require scrolling to get to the text, due to the vast graphical heading at the top.
>From a security perspective, an HTML based newsletter is also flawed, since a large number of a certain brand of email client still have a critical security hole that means viewing any HTML in that email client is inadvisable (due to javascript being embedded in the HTML), and a track record that suggests it won’t be the last such hole.
There are also privacy issues with reading HTML email, unless you turn off the loading of remote images (since the images can be ‘bugged’ to track the reader). For this reason, more and more newsletters come with images embedded as attachments. I’ve seen newsletters ranging in size from 100KB to 1MB in size (and a few larger, thanks to badly compressed PDF/Word attachments). Not only is that a waste of traffic for the sender, it’s extremely inconsiderate to the poor reader, the majority of whom still do not have broadband.
Plain text might be bland, but it is still the only way of guaranteeing that your message will reach the largest possible audience.