It seems that email has caught my fancy today, not only have I already made note of two things regarding email today, I’ve been coding some email notification structures into a couple of apps as well. It does seem that I am not alone in thinking about email today…
Zeldman, my guru for all things standard and design centric (I am an engineer at heart so design is not visual to me usually), is talking about a new group looking at standards and email client support. Hard to believe that this has to be a new effort. Man if you have ever tried to do fancy email to clients from an app you know what a tough nut this is to crack.
Ten years into the web standards revolution, e-mail client support for standards remains sketchy. A new group is doing something about it. They need your support.
Garret Dimon another voice I listen to in this regard also is pointing to the same effort
While I personally don’t do much with HTML email, I have in the past, and it’s a painfully laborious process. The email standards project is here to help change that. The community has made great progress improving the adoption of web standards, but HTML email is having a much more difficult time having consistent standards at all. The goal is reasonable, and more importantly, it’s one we can all contribute to in some small way.
The biggest obstacle to productivity is connectivity. Too many of us have become addicted to email, to our feed readers, to Twitter and IM, to forums, to social sites like MySpace and YouTube and Digg. It’s an addiction, and as yet, no good cure for it has been found.
Man there are some lessons I need to learn from this. I do use mail to procrastinate way too often…
How many times have you received an email with a subject line that said something like “Question†or “FYI� Or, worse yet, had no subject at all? For all the millions of email messages that traverse the Internet every day, the ability to effectively formulate an indicative subject message seems to be fairly unimportant to most people. A quick skim of the last 100 or so email messages you’ve received will likely support my claims.
The minimum:
* Use keywords like Question, Response, FYI or he says ’spam’ why the heck would I send spam? and why would I read your email if you tell me it’s spam, I’m not some kind of Spam junkie, my sister in law is…
* Briefly describe the subject
* Never leave the subject blank
Now these are good, worth linking to in your .sig but really, why do people need to be told this, it is maddening, why do people not at least describe in the subject.
how do I know it bugs me… I wrote about it before http://blog.samdevore.com/archives/2007/09/16/email-subjects-welcome-to-my-pet-peeve/
In no particular order
* When choking on an ice cube, simply pour a cup of boiling water down your throat. Presto! The blockage will instantly remove itself.
* Avoid cutting yourself slicing vegetables by getting someone else to hold while you chop.
* Avoid arguments with the Mrs. about lifting the toilet seat by using the sink.
* [Read the rest]
Jon Davis has created CacheFile, a place to store versions of common libraries such as Dojo, jQuery, Ext, Prototype and more. Dojo has a nice CDN already thanks to AOL, and YUI thanks to Yahoo! The other libraries don’t have the same, so this could be the solution:
There are certainly uses for this, but the CDNs that Yahoo and Dojo run on would be huge for other libraries as well
