If the IETF wants to discourage top posting, write a mail markup that makes inline comments work reliably. I am sure the mail teams at Apple, Google and Microsoft would be interested. They probably spend much of their time dealing with vague interop.
On Sun, Aug 20, 2023 at 1:49 PM Christian Huitema <huitema@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 8/20/2023 8:37 AM, John R Levine wrote:
>> Either the IETF should strip all html before forwarding e-mails to a
>> list, or webmail providers should be REQUIRED to provide an option to
>> display only text/plain and to suppress any text/html (just like all
>> MUA that I have ever had the privilege to use have offered me).
>
> REQUIRED? Um, I think the Network Police are currently on summer vacation.
John, we would not need Internet-wide policing to enforce text only
contributions to the IETF mailing lists. We would need some kind of
processor to only forward messages if they are encoded in text/plain, or
maybe to something more complicated and only forward the text/plain
rendering of the contribution. And appropriate error messages going back
to contributors of non-forwardable messages.
Of course, that may or may not be a good idea. It would certainly add a
barrier of entry, making contributions harder, and possibly discouraging
newcomers. It would also not prevent people from alternating between
top-posting and in-line commenting, and it would not prevent different
MUA from adopting incompatible conventions for in-line commenting.
-- Christian Huitema
