Sam said:
We both know that about 99% of email that is not exclusively
plain-text uses HTML,
I doubt that figure.
Quite some mails come with "RTF" (which is a totally different beast).
And both is a bad thing, IMHO.
which is described in RFC 2557. It does however
include PDF, and I did not know that it PDF is included in the RFCs.
Does this really matter?
Yes, and you were talking about HTML and PDF. So what are you trying
to say here?
HTML can be used as format for editing a mail. PDF not.
And in my original posting I had been talking about adding a PDF as an
*attachment* instead of fancy formatting in a mail's body.
Email software such as Windows Mail (which is what we are talking
about, correct?) supports HTML for messages but not PDF; or did I
miss something?
Right.
Nut HTML used in mails is not standard HTML - just to mention the
problems used by Outlook. And WinMail also has it's own variation.
Perhaps I am uninformed, but it is my understanding that PDF editors
are not free and there is little or no competition among available
editors.
There's quite some free tools for creating PDFs.
My favorite is the OpenSource PDFCreator[
http://www.pdfforge.org/products/pdfcreator
And if one has Office2007, PDF creation is built in.
Yes, I am behind a few years. PDF is described in Request for
Comments: 3778. That RFC has a year of 2004 and I don't see that it
supersedes another RFC.
Does this matter for the question if using PDF attachments instead if
formatting mails in HTML?
For sure!
The original idea if MS has been to deliver the Office 2007 apps with
PDF creation built in. This caused troubles with Adobe. Si they had to
leave out and they offered a "PDF/XMS" add-in for download.
But AFAIK with the SP2 for Office 2007 it's now included.
Office has supported HTML, including HTML for email, for
many years (and a few versions) before that.
And the implementation in Outlook was bad enough :-( :-(
PDF originally was proprietary
Not really. The concept behind it (originally called "Carousel") was an
interchangeable format being usable on all platforms. And this concept
was really successful.
As to my knowledge in the business world at least 90% of documents sent
around come as PDFs. And in properly organized enterprise f.e. DOCs are
only sent in cases where the recipient shall be enabled to *edit* the
document.
and the software was buggy and resource-intensive.
Which software are you talking about?
I have been heavily using Acrobat since its version 2. I can not confirm
that Acrobat would have been "buggy".
Adobe was late to make it non-proprietary. PDF
would have been more successful if Adobe were to have not kept it
proprietary.
Free Readers have been available from the very beginning, IIRC.
The buggy condition of the software I am sure was
another limitation to earlier success.
As above.
But be it so, the success of the file format can not be denied.
But why are we discussing that?
My approach simply was to deny the need to use HTML and/or what in
WinMail is called Rich-Text (HTML) in mails.
I may seem old-fashioned but I stay with my device that plain text is
fully sufficient for any kind if mail.
Rainald