Re: [Tools-discuss] messaging formatting follies, was The IETF's email

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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





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