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Subject:HTML E-mail and Audience Awareness From:"George F. Hayhoe" <george -at- GHAYHOE -dot- COM> Date:Sat, 27 Jun 1998 10:55:57 -0400
I've been giving a lot of thought lately to the question of
availability of technology to our audiences.
Many of us have faced this problem in the past few years in
terms of deciding what HTML level and flavor to adopt for
Web pages (to use tables, use tags supported by Netscape or
Microsoft but not the other vendor, etc.). In the more
distant past before cross-platform tools were common, we
often had to be concerned with supporting multiple operating
systems.
Here's a question that is a bit more current: How common is
HTML support in e-mail readers used by most folks?
I use a mailer that includes HTML as a supported format, but
I've resisted using it thus far (except in responding to
messages from others sent in HTML format) because I didn't
want correspondents to be puzzled or confused by the HTML
code at the end of a plain text message if their mailer
didn't support HTML.
In fact, I do a lot of business by e-mail, and the
availability of bold and italic type, various paragraph
alignments and indentations, bulleted lists, and so forth
that HTML mail provides would help make my messages more
effective.
Any thoughts? Is it safe to assume today that most people's
e-mail readers support HTML?
