On 8/21/23 15:44, Christian Huitema wrote: What about | Simple proposal: we should move our culture to top-posting. No tool side-posting? | needed. Don't worry too much bout text/plain versus text/html. It's fun. | > I think that this | Or middle posting, where | thread clearly exposed the problem. Many IETF > participants follow | I inject my text right | the a long established practice of commenting on > email by editing the | in the middle of the | message and inserting their comments inline wit> the text. That | message. | practice does not align with the fraction of the > participants who prefer | I d v | top posting. It also does not align with > existing MUA that follow | o e | a variety of conventions for inserting > comments inline comments | c r | in response, to the point that after a few > replies it becomes very | a t t | hard to understand who exactly made what > argument. | n h i | > | a c | > As I mentioned in a | a t a | previous mail, the IETF could in theory enforce > that mail would be sent | l l | in text/plain, but this is not realistic, as > many participants either | s l | are accustomed to always use HTML or do not > have a choice. Besides, | o y | 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 >> -- Marc Petit-Huguenin Email: marc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Blog: https://marc.petit-huguenin.org Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petithug
Attachment:
OpenPGP_signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
