On 4/10/23 14:51, John Levine wrote:
It appears that Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:
After MIME got out the door, it took a long time for the user agents to
catch up with even the modest increase in capabilities, ...
(MIME had richtext, but I don't think it was obviously better for
email than HTML of that time was. And some web browsers had email user
agents built in, and those browsers already had HTML support, so HTML
"won".)
HTML did more than win, it became the place where people put all of the
interesting structured stuff. See schema.org for a bunch of examples,
or look at the structured email stuff happening in the IETF:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/bofreq-happel-structured-email/
Ah, thanks for reminding me. So in other words, the damage to email
that HTML caused may become even further entrenched.
(In general I think "structured email" is a clever and useful idea, but
I hope it doesn't mean that email is stuck with HTML in its current
form. And I don't think it's easy to fix.)
Keith
