On Sat, Aug 19, 2023 at 03:07:03PM -0400, Michael Richardson wrote: > > Theodore Ts'o <tytso@xxxxxxx> wrote: > > Ultimately, this is a community decision, and it very much is more of a > > social rather than technical problem. > > Mostly. There are some technical aspects hidden, and as the owners of the > email specifications, the IETF really needs to take the lead on a few things. > > 1. Marking emails as text/plain; format=flowed correctly is one of them. > 2. The mail archives do not render text/html, but apparently do store it. > I'd like to see that change actually: I don't think we should keep it > either. > I am concerned that our visible archives contains thousands and > thousands of tracking links. Not only do they catch people unawares, but > they also break. Unless you hard bounce text/html messages (what the kernel.org mailing list server does), or strip out the text/html part, then what people see when they look at the mailing list archives might be different from what the active working group members subscribed to the mailing list might see. I could see that causing all sorts of potential mischief, if not confusion. > I think that this why the linux kernel community is not ossified. > Also, if a contributor ignore the standards of behaviour, then they won't > make any progress. That's not true in the IETF. Well, yeah. If you send a message that is larger than 100k, or contains text/html, to a kernel.org mailing list, the message will go <<boing>>, and people on the list will never see it. So it's not so much a "standard of behavior", but rather, a hard technical requirement which is enforced at the mailing list server level. Obviously, that's not the case with the IETF. The place where this becomes a social issue is that MIME and text/html e-mail messages are a creature of the IETF, and it might seem... weird... that the IETF would reject messages sent in a format that it promulgated. Not to mention that there are probably a lot of existing IETF'ers who would call people who call for such restrictions as luddites, and constraining forward progress, and predict that newcomers will flee in horror at such a backwards attitude.... And that is *definitely* a social issue. As an (at this point, outside) observer, I don't believe there is any kind of consensus within the IETF for imposing plain text as a requirement for its mailing list. All I can say is that predictions of doom for eschewing HTML e-mail has not seem to have been realized within the Linux kernel technical community. Cheers, - Ted
