useplaintext.email website screenshot made on February 15, 2025
It’s both amusing and disheartening to read an article from 2016 that addresses the problems in a widely used technology and offers better alternatives to prevalent yet highly annoying practices, only to realize that nothing has changed in the past seven years. At least things haven’t deteriorated any further! Or did they?
HTML emails often contain tracking images. Though many modern email clients have learned to tackle this problem. But not all of them have.
HTML rendering engines in email clients are a common source of security vulnerabilities.
HTML makes phishing easier by making it trivial to hide the actual URL of the link.
HTML emails break natural inline quoting that was the cornerstone of email and newsgroup communications for half a century.
Drew even put up a neat website: “Use plain text email” complete with the software recommendations, How-To’s for almost all modern email clients (including the web-based ones), and even the etiquette tips for those of us who forgot or never learned them.
Idiocracy in a Blade Runner landscape — describes the first half of the Web split in two Ploum in his blog post “Splitting the Web”.
He argues that the modern Web was divided into two sides:
the first side is commercial, built upon megabytes of JavaScript frameworks that serve mostly corporations, not website visitors, by tracking every visitors’ step and showing them ads on every corner;
the second is the internet of tech-savvy people who share information without relying on the services of the mega-corporations and tech monopolies and often actively avoiding being tracked and bombarded with ads.
Between those two extremes, the gap is widening.
DP Review: Web rot is erasing our images and videos
The Internet is burning away our photos, videos and older websites daily. At nearly 40 years old, the Internet had lost much of its early history to changing technology and corporate and user desires.
DP Review, the iconic digital photography e-zine and online forum, the cornerstone of the digital camera revolution of the 00’s, has barely escaped being shut down by its parent company, Amazon, and the subsequent deletion of all its content just earlier this Summer when it was acquired by Gear Patrol. This is why, probably, the topic of content disappearing from the web hits close to home for Shaminder Dulai, DP Review staff writer.
In his clear and well-thought-out essay he researched two major reasons for the so called web rot, the disappearance of old content from the web over time: change in technologies and the desire of the tech corporations, the owners of the web platforms we all use, to cut costs without second thought about preservation of the users’ content.
He suggests to take preservation of our digital treasures in our own hands, because we can’t trust this mission to the corporate spreadsheets. Some things require a heart.
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