I've tried. I really have. I installed sendmail on my own server, and used it for a communications project that it was well suited to. I've participated in the email-based development of content posted to many-to-many, and had many email exchanges over the years.

I love email's functionality. I really do. It's very very cool to be able to do "ridiculously easy" sending and receiving.

But...let's face it. Email is ugly.

This, of course, is the opening of Liz's objection to wikis, with wiki -> email. And it isn't just a joke. I think it's an accurate assessment of both media. As with wikis, email is ugly; not only is it usually raw or barely formatted text, once an actual conversation starts, it quickly becomes a visual stew of attribution tags and quote depth markers and is, in general, a mess.

Furthermore, we don't just tolerate the mess of email, we expect it. When I start to open a really well-designed piece of HTML email, I generally delete it, as it is almost invariably spam. Spending too much time to make email look good is an inherently suspect activity.

And yet email is the One True Tool, the only thing on the net that works as advertized, the serial killer app. Email works so beautifully because it sidesteps presentation and let's people express themselves, in various degrees of formality, in words. (And if you think email is ugly, wait 'til you get a look at IM...)

So while I think Liz is right that wikis are ugly, I think the issue is more complicated than "people like nice visuals." If that were all it was, we'd all be using style-sheets in our email. There are, I think, several related issues:

• Unlike email, potential users experience wikis as readers before they experience them as participants, making the experience feel like web browsing rather than conversation.
• The browser has conditioned us to crave layout. Email also looks worse in a webmail interface than a dedicated mail interface, and I think part of the reason is that we expect the browser to be a publishing medium rather than a conversational one.
• Posting in a web page feels like publishing. This is the flip side of #1. When a user puts something on a web page, ir feels more like a Word doc or PowerPoint than it does like email.
• Wiki syntax is a hurdle for new users. While Liz calls Wiki syntax 'arcane', I don't think that's quite right. (Believe me, the interface we use to post here is far more arcane than any wiki I've ever used.) It's just that anything unfamiliar presents a hurdle.

These issues conspire to create the sense that Liz has articulated (and that many people feel), but the ugliness is a by-product of making a conversational medium.

Weblogs provide a good counter-example. While wikis make a poor presentation medium (when my students use wikis, they universally and unconciously move the content into Word, PowerPoint, HTML or Flash when they ahve to present), weblogs are in many ways too pretty. Two of the key advances in blogging came with the use of two- or three-column formats, and decent default stylesheets, which guarantee that even 50 words will look substantial and well-laid out (a fact used to amusing effect at the dullest blog in the world.) Weblogs thus suffer from the opposite problem -- making even uninteresting content look important.

There are things wiki designers can do (better default style-sheets, experiments with two-column layout and "edit this column" buttons, Textpattern-style input areas), but the risk is that by making wikis less ugly, they will also be making them less conversational and therefore less useful.

We are seeing an explosion in experimentation with wikis, and with wiki/weblog fusion, so there will probably be lots of different answers to questions of visual presentation in wikis, but I'm betting that the most useful wikis will stay on the ugly side, for the same reason most email does.