On 8/22/23 08:51, John R Levine wrote: >> In Thunderbird: View | Message Body As | Plain Text >> >> This is always on and in my experience any email that becomes ineligible because of that is not worth my attention. > > That's nice, but there's no Thuderbird for tablets or phones, and the numbers I've seen say it has about a 2% share of desktop users. Your ASCII art does look fine in Alpine which is what we Real Men(tm) use. > > Even if I could find an MUA that showed messages in fixed pitch text, on a tablet, it would be too small for my tired old eyes to read, and on a phone too small for anyone to read. There's a reason MIME added proportional fonts and flowed text, so that actual people can read their mail. I am not saying that we should not have HTML in email, quite the opposite: Without it how would I be able to know which email are not worth my time? This is not just me being a contrarian. I am *highly* suspicious of anyone not able to express their thoughts in US-ASCII in an email or in an RFC. We can add more more emphasis on words and phrases and still use US-ASCII by borrowing from AsciiDoc/MarkDown, like I did for the work "highly" in this sentence. In fact I think that supporting AsciiDoc in email would be a great improvement for technical discussions, and maybe it would be possible to represent a hierarchy of comments in a flexible way as an extension to AsciiDoc. > > It's amazing how many people here appear to believe that mail was perfect in the 1990s and nothing has changed. I better not ask if anyone uses IPv6. > > R's, > John > >> On 8/21/23 19:05, John R Levine wrote: >>> While I greatly admire your ASCII art in principle, I regret to report that on my Android phone and iPad it's completely illegible. >>> >>> Much though some of us might wish otherwise, it's not 1990 any more, and fixed pitch ASCII text isn't what most mail programs expect or display. >>> >>> (On the other hand, if you'd sent HTML mail and wrapped it in <pre> or used <tt> it'd have looked fine. >>> >>> R's, >>> John >>> >>> On Mon, 21 Aug 2023, Marc Petit-Huguenin wrote: >>> >>>> 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 >> >> > > 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
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