[Foundation-l] A designer? (was: Better user experience and retention through e-mail notifications)

[Tim Starling]

On 26/04/11 02:37, Dan Collins wrote:
[...]
>> The main problem is that they are plain text instead of HTML.
> 
> This is most certainly /not/ a problem. What would be a problem would be if
> MediaWiki chose to jump on the bandwagon of embedding huge external images
> in emails to users. Bandwidth? Tracking? Smaller screens (mobile)? Text
> interfaces?

It's true that moving to multi-part plain text and HTML will offend
that tiny camp who still support exclusive plain text communication. I
think that's a fair price to pay.

The problem with plain text email is not just that it's written in
plain text. Plain text email has line breaks added by the sender at
around 75 columns, meaning that it's difficult to display it on small
screens, and it can't take advantage of large screens.

Plain text email is problematic to use with bidirectional languages
such as Hebrew, since unlike everything else on the Internet, it uses
visual order by default, instead of logical order. MediaWiki does not
support visual order.

Plain text email is conventionally displayed in a monospace font.
This, and the lack of other useful formatting, makes it difficult to
read for dyslexics.

So even when you're just sending plain text, you're better off with
HTML. But if we add support for HTML email for MediaWiki's
notification emails, we can also add useful features like embedding
HTML diff pages in change notification emails.

As for bandwidth: it requires a lot of patience to edit Wikipedia via
dialup. The articles are huge and more image-rich than ever, and the
discussion pages are huge too. By contrast, our notification emails
are currently 2-3 KB each. We could increase them to 50KB each, and
they would still be insigificant compared to the other things that
editors have to download in the course of their work.

-- Tim Starling