[thelist] Newsletter as HTML Email

[Steven Streight]

Fascinating. Thanks Hassan for sticking to your guns and be such a
gentleman. I admire you, though I retain my position on this matter.

On 2/1/07, Hassan Schroeder <hassan.schroeder at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 2/1/07, Barney Carroll <barney at textmatters.com> wrote:
>
> > I'm not so sure about the orange icon (you do know what I'm talking
> > about, right? -
> > http://www.somerandomdude.net/images/articles/rss_vs_rss.gif) being that
> > complicated,
>
> Hence my question about a site with "an orange icon" -- the one you
> cite doesn't appear on Huffington's blog signup, though you have to
> pick one of two mysterious choices. Closer to home, look at the first
> of the list of Steven's blogs -- no less than 9 icons under "Feeds",
> only one of which says "subscribe" and none of which say "RSS".
> This is "better" than a simple text box to sign up for a newsletter?
> [Steven, I realize your audience is not Arianna Huffington's  :-) ]
>
> Yes, I'm aware of the whole silly 0.91/1.0/2.0/Atom mess -- that's not
> the end user's problem. Do you think email adoption would be what
> it is now, if *non-technical end users* had to choose one of several
> competing email technologies? And first choose an email client that
> used that technology?
>
> >    .......           if you think they're really afraid of change, and
> give a
> > nice little paragraph preceded by the word 'Simply' on how to get the
> > feed into their reader.
>
> No offense, but there you go again, assuming everyone is like you --
> these people *don't have a "reader"*. They don't know what one is,
> and they don't use RSS now.
>
> The example process I used of trying to sign up for a mainstream
> blog should illustrate the scope of the problem.
>
> > I don't think you give non-techie humans enough
> > credit. They learnt how to turn on their PC and open IE, didn't they?
>
> Yes, because there was an obvious benefit to them. And what they
> learned works for them now. You're asking them to add a whole new
> behavior *with no discernable benefit*.
>
> > Besides, the alternative of not doing anything and basking in the status
> > quo is getting worse all the time. Can you give us an example of on of
> > your HTML newsletters? List users could send you back screenshots of
> > what the product looks like on their various interfaces. Why not?
>
> I agree that the introduction of Vista/Outlook using Word's renderer is
> a brand-spanking-new PITA in terms of testing.
>
> But the newsletter I'm talking about is already extensively tested -- in
> Outlook, Thunderbird, Google and Yahoo web mail, and Mac OS X Mail.
> And it works perfectly, and there's always the plain-text version with
> it to fall back on. So thanks, but I don't see the need. :-)
>
> --
> Hassan Schroeder ------------------------ hassan.schroeder at gmail.com
> --
>
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-- 
Steven Streight aka Vaspers the Grate
Web Usability. Blog Revolution. Ecommerce.


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