Simple proposal: we should move our culture to top-posting. No tool
needed. Don't worry too much bout text/plain versus text/html.
I think that this thread clearly exposed the problem. Many IETF
participants follow a long established practice of commenting on email
by editing the message and inserting their comments inline with the
text. That practice does not align with the fraction of the participants
who prefer top posting. It also does not align with existing MUA that
follow a variety of conventions for inserting comments inline comments
in response, to the point that after a few replies it becomes very hard
to understand who exactly made what argument.
As I mentioned in a previous mail, the IETF could in theory enforce that
mail would be sent in text/plain, but this is not realistic, as many
participants either are accustomed to always use HTML or do not have a
choice. Besides, even a return to plain text would not solve the
confusion between inline commenting and top posting, or the formatting
mess caused by different inline conventions of different MUA.
Moving to top-posting only would solve these issues. It will be a bit
less easy for some commenters, who would have to explicitly copy and
paste the fragments of message to which they reply, but it would
definitely solve the top-posting vs. inline comment issue. It would also
solve the issue with formatting of inline comments, because each "top"
message would stand on its own, and presumably be presented exactly as
its sender intended.
If participants chooses to write in text/plain, their messages would be
presented accordingly, and if other participants chose text/html, this
would mostly work too. The only ambiguity would be multipart messages
with different content in text/plain and text/html -- but here too, the
solution is probably in the culture.
-- Christian Huitema
On 8/21/2023 2:51 PM, John R Levine wrote:
It appears that Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:
SMTP email is not the only messaging format in use and it has been
gradually losing market share.
I suppose, although people have been predicting the death of e-amil for
decades and it's still the only messaging system we have that actually
interoperates.
Person to person communication is no longer limited to email, there is
instant messaging, chat, voice and video all growing in popularity.
The EU
has decided those infrastructures are going to interoperate no matter
what
the execs of certain trillion dollar enterprises would like to happen.
And
they certainly have widespread popular support for that.
Yup. I suppose it would be nice to send messages from Whatsapp to
iMessage but we all know how hard it is to do that without letting
everyone in the middle read it.
So it is a matter of when, not if a mail format is added to those other
messaging formats once interop is achieved.
But mail achieved interop forty years ago. It may have its problems,
but that's not one of them.
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@xxxxxxxxx, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
