On 3/2/21 12:07 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
I think you are overstating several things. For example, 'the other 3 billion Internet users' didn't necessarily want the HTML email we have with all of its privacy issues and other warts. To a large extent they just used what they were given. They may have had a choice of plain text vs. html email (and some may still have that choice), but the particular kind of HTML that their preferred MUA or more likely webmail implementation generates is now the widespread default
The points you make are all good, and good reason why IETF mailing lists
should silently discard text/html attachments.
No it shouldn't. The reason HTML email is so crappy is precisely because people here failed to realize why the other 3 billion Internet users wanted it. And you are still making that mistake.
Most IETF users aren't "fond of VT100 console output" either. Even in IETF there are probably few users of plain-text email systems running in terminal windows. (Not zero, but relatively few.) And most IETF users can probably make good occasional use of bold face, italic, color, etc. But because of the way we use email, with some conventions dating from when email was plain text only, we are especially aware of some of the worst limitations of HTML email.
Only a very very small fraction of the world is fond of VT100 console output. It is a significant fraction of IETF but its still a minority.
Or maybe because each company had a different idea of what "really good" HTML email would be like, and nobody took a leadership role to try to make it interoperable.HTML email is bad because nobody in the places which might have had influence wanted to make it really good.
SMTP has had a good run. So has the telephone system. But they are both long past their prime and need to go the way of the fax machine.
Yeah, right. (Note that the fax machine has gone away largely
because SMTP has replaced it.)
Anybody can design a system that's theoretically better than any
existing system if they are smart enough and work hard enough.
The trick is to get everyone else to go along with it. And to
displace something that actually exists and is working, the new
system has to be MUCH better than the old. The more widely
deployed the existing system is, the harder it is to replace it.
And incremental changes are not as pure as a clean sheet design,
they are usually easier to deploy.
Keith
