My friend and colleague Rod wonders if anybody uses tinyurl. I
blogged
about tinyurl some time ago and my immediate reaction to Rod’s question was "I use it all the time".
Then I thought a little bit more and it occurred to me that I used to use it all
the time, but I have dramatically reduced the amount of tinyurl’s I send in my emails.
Why?
Simply because I use "real links" in emails now.
I don’t know about you, but while 99% of the emails I receive are in HTML,
very few use even the most basic features of HTML (bold, italics, color) and
much less HREF’s. When someone wants me to take a look at a certain link, the email
typically looks like this:
From: Friend of Cedric
To: Cedric
Subject: Cool tool!Hey Ced, check out this tool, it really helps speed up EJB development:
http://beust.com/weblog/ejbgen
A few months ago, I noticed this and wondered how come nobody bothers to use
real links in their emails? After all, it’s not like senders are not
familiar with HTML and they certainly know how to insert an href in a text, regardless
of the tool they use. So why don’t we see more emails such as:
From: Friend of Cedric
To: Cedric
Subject: Cool tool!Hey Ced, check out this tool, it really
helps speed up EJB development.
It is trivial to insert a link with Mozilla (Ctrl-L) and Outlook (Ctrl-K,
same as FrontPage), so why don’t people use this feature more? Once you
start using links in your emails, the need for tinyurl is greatly
reduced. I still use tinyurl for my Yahoo Messenger status, though.
How about yourself? Do you use real links in your emails? When
you compose an email, do you bother adding some formatting such as color or
bulleted lists to make your message easier to read?
How
about email you receive?
#1 by Dion on November 10, 2003 - 8:01 am
Hi Ced –
I know that most people have HTML enabled mail clients… but does everyone? If you use:
“Foo: http://www.foo.com”
then text mail clients get more context.
I don’t know if this matters much anymore though.
It does bug me when people do the opposite of what you are saying, and they OVERUSE HTML in their email. Damn stationary! 🙂
Dion
#2 by Anthony Eden on November 10, 2003 - 8:50 am
I still avoid using HTML in my mail if possible, although it is tempting. HTML mail when overused, as Dion pointed out, can be so extremely frustrating.
#3 by Anonymous on November 10, 2003 - 12:01 pm
Quite a few mail clients and more and more anti-spam/anti-virus mail gateways filter out all HTML from messages, including links.
This is the main historical and still valid reason for making URLs appear clearly in the text.
#4 by Cedric on November 10, 2003 - 12:11 pm
I would argue that if they remove the links during the clearing process, then they are broken and you should use a different client…
I mean, how hard is it to transform
Check it out
Into
Check it out (link: http://foo.com).
Note that this is how Slashdot cleans up its posts.
#5 by Cedric on November 10, 2003 - 12:11 pm
Oops, MT ate the HTML 🙂
#6 by Anonymous on November 10, 2003 - 12:28 pm
I know… but the recepient often doesn’t have control on his company’s software packages and firewalls and you just want to get your message through… so you rant at broken software a couple of times and eventually you end up just adapting silently… :/
#7 by Zohar on November 13, 2003 - 3:57 pm
Cedric,
We are resigned to using a corporate Notes R4.x
with no support for html mail.
We might join the html revolution some day…
#8 by Rod Chavez on November 13, 2003 - 4:54 pm
i think the reason has more to do with simplicity then anything else. it’s just easier to copy a link directly in as text then it is to use a gesture, no matter how few steps it is
the other thing is that there are many, many places where it’s interesting to copy a link in, email, IM, little text boxes like the one i’m in right now, other html-forms, IM status, wikis, it goes on and on
some of these have no means of forming links, they just assume that a smart parser will “linkify” the URL. those that do have a real link-creation-gesture are all different from one another (albeit still simple)
so in the end, people pick the path of least resistance as long as it gets the job done “mostly”