--On Saturday, 19 August, 2023 15:34 -0400 Theodore Ts'o <tytso@xxxxxxx> wrote: >... > 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.... >... Ted, To that one point only, while MIME itself is a somewhat different matter, the core of the media type idea is much closer to "if you decide to do something weird, then identify it so it does not become an annoyance and can be processed (or rendered) correctly rather than having that depend on heuristics and that systems can figure out what they can and cannot process" than to a recommendation for support of any one type or format. In addition, multipart/alternative, which is now mostly seen when text/plain and text/html are sent in the same message, started out long ago as a mechanism for transmitting a message translated into multiple languages rather than as different body part formats. At least if all three are properly registered, the difference between text/plain and text/html on the one hand and text/MMouse-private on the other is not a matter of IETF recommendation or promulgation but what the receiving systems and MUA choose to support. And IETF standards are fairly agnostic about the latter. best, john p.s. The other advantage of plain text over HTML mail is a security issue. The former is far less likely to provide a vehicle for privacy disclosures or actual security problems than the latter. To a certain extent that is a implementation issue, but I do not believe the IETF has issues a standard or BCP for that absolutely safe render of HTML email body parts.
