Top posting to point out that the reason this fell through the cracks is we got the division of responsibility wrong.
It certainly made sense for IETF to stick to protocols and W3C to do the Web application layer. But that orphaned email message format which was neither fish nor fowl.
We might have stood a better chance of keeping document structure separate from presentation if email messaging was on the docket.
And before we close, is Google ever going to fix the Gmail Web browse reader? Whenever someone posts an image 'wider than the screen' (it's pixels), it pukes on the formatting of the entire thread and I have to scroll left to read 500 character lines.
This is such an obvious poke in the eye of every GMail reader, but I am sure that extensive usability tests in 1472 proved that this was the correct way to use parchment.
On Sun, Aug 20, 2023 at 4:49 PM John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> wrote:
--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
