[43920]

AFAIK, "email HTML" isn't standardized either; most organizations that make nice-looking HTML emails have to do a ton of testing across different clients and come up with workarounds to make everything look consistent.

[WorldMaker]

It's fascinating how much "email HTML" is trapped in about HTML ~2.5, with limited CSS support and still a ton of FONT tags and TABLE layouts.

HTML 2 might be an interesting subset of HTML to "focus on" for smolweb, but it would be a big retro throwback, and not feel at all modern.

If you were starting today, might be more interesting to start with the most modern stuff and work backwards. HTML 2 TABLE could be implemented as a specialization of CSS Grid, for instance.

[notpushkin]

Could we standardize email HTML?

[jeroenhd]

If you can convince Apple, Google, and Microsoft to implement your standard: sure. Attempts have been made with varying success.

Your standard still needs to render in Outlook on Windows, though, which means you need to support the weird Office version of IE11 as an upper limit.

[OptionX]

You could write a standard.

If it actually gets mainstream adoption or goes into the standards pile it another question entirely.