On 8/22/23 12:35, Marc Petit-Huguenin wrote:
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?
I tend to judge competence by people's words more than by the specific
tools they use. I mean, sure, I probably do respect an emacs user more
than a vi user ( :) ) but I also recognize that there are competent
individuals who have valuable ideas to contribute, who don't use the
same tools that I prefer.
Specifically, I don't find that use of plain text without HTML is a
reliable indicator of competence, or that use of HTML is a reliable
indicator of less competence. And I'm very much in favor of IETF
being open to effective participation to anyone who is competent enough
to contribute usefully (and even try to be tolerant of those who are
behind the curve). So I think effective IETF participation needs to be
open to users of a wide variety of MUAs and email providers. I also
think that, at least in the near term, trying to convince every IETF
participant to use either plain text or AsciiDoc or Markdown to the
exclusion of HTML, will be a difficult sell. If we want people to use
a special tool set for IETF, we need to demonstrate to them that it's
really worth everyone using those tools.
[I still have this idea that people should be able to submit
internet-drafts in HTML, such as can be produced by any word processor
these days, with a few hacks to include the necessary metadata, and a
few heuristics to allow good quality xml2rfc to be reliably produced
from the HTML source input. If at some point down the line the xml2rfc
becomes the source document, that's not the end of the world. But it
should be *easy* to submit internet-drafts, far easier than it currently
is. Similarly, it should be easy to effectively participate in IETF
email discussions.]
(if only we had widely-implemented and interoperable standards so that
everyone could use their own tools as long as those tools conformed to
the standards...)
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.
I might have some of the same biases. And yet, I also realize that on
some occasions, say, some really good drawings can express an idea far
more clearly than any words alone can do. And ASCII is far from an
ideal tool for drawing. I accept that there really is no good widely
applicable solution now for either drawings [*] or a high-fidelity
portable archival quality document format that can include drawings, but
that's actually kind of painful and a situation that I hope will be
resolved in the future.
[*] please don't say SVG. I consider it a disaster. EVERY SINGLE TIME
I've tried to use SVG for something I've regretted it.
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 not my favorite, but in general I think we need to be able to
evolve and adapt our authoring (including email authoring) over time,
while still permitting old documents (including email messages) to
continue to be read, indefinitely into the future. And I recognize that
this will be an ongoing effort for the indefinite future.
Keith
