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

[Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I take no credit.  All I (and many others) saw was the need for a simple kind of email formatting lingua franca -- basically the same kind of reasoning that led to Markdown a decade+ later.  Several people fought against text/html when it appeared (very early) in email, many of them for the reasons we worry about it today, but I was never active in that fight because I instantly perceived it as a lost cause.

But I couldn't have anticipated the problems with HTML email when we were designing text/enriched, because I had never even *heard* of HTML.  The text/enriched spec was already part of draft-borenstein-mumble-665 (or something like that) when I got a phone call from somebody at CERN (I really wish I could remember who):

CERN:  We're looking to add multimedia to the world wide web, and we heard about the work you're doing in email, and we were wondering if you thought it would work for the web as well?

Me:  What's the world wide web?

Nowadays, I am occasionally and erroneously referred to as one of the inventors of the web.  I take no credit for that, either. -- Nathaniel

On Mon, Aug 21, 2023 at 4:21 PM Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Seems about time to take this off the IETF list with a bunch of action items for a design team interested in working on this under NOTE WELL:

* Should ping Nathaniel Bornstein who definitely has a dog in this fight even if it is only the satisfaction of being right (CCd)

* An ID looking towards being an informational RFC to specify a single dialect of Markdown, I think this has to describe what GitHub does because that is driving convergence.

* A second ID describing the mail discussion message format based on the informational.

* Code.