--On Saturday, 19 August, 2023 17:46 -0400 Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >... > The reason HTML email exists is simple: The users decided they > wanted it. And when the IETF did not deliver an HTML email > standard that worked, every vendor went off and invented their > own riff on the theme. And so we have the worst of all worlds. >... Another historical note: At least IIR, there was a very explicit agreement between the IETF and (early) W3C that HTTP was about the network and hence IETF's responsibility but that HTML belonged entirely to W3C. That was before W3C decided to be in the standards business so some early (from your standpoint, probably intermediate) HTML documents were published in the RFC series but, if you look at their authorship, starting with RFC 1866, you will find some familiar names. >... > Now could we have done better? Well Nathaniel Bornstein > attempted to deliver rich-text when he was working on MIME and > got a lot of grief for the effort. And, while I can't speak to the grief level, although I remember some enthusiasm other than just Nathaniel's, some of it based on concerns about where various other, non-text, forms might lead and no significant opposition, rich text is definitely in the original MIME specification (RFC 1341) and all of its successors as text/richtext and that media type still appears in the IANA registry. john
