On 8/22/23 15:37, Marc Petit-Huguenin wrote:
I read my incoming emails exclusively as text, which can in some cases be a conversion from HTML.
Sure, you can do that, and you can ignore any email that isn't legible after such conversion. For that matter you could read IETF email on an old ADM-3 attached to an old VAX (or an emulated one) running 4.3BSD and MH. It would still mostly work. And you could refuse to look at any document in HTML, PDF, Word, etc. But you'd probably miss out on some valuable information here or there.
I guess I think that, for better or worse, HTML has effectively replaced ASCII as the common format that (almost) everyone can read. My guess is that if we asked people to send email in HTML, we'd get a lot more acceptance than if we asked people to send all email in plain text. Not everybody can run Thunderbird or whatever; some IETF participants are effectively required by their employers to use Outlook or worse.
I'm glad that IETF puts lots of thought into the document formats it uses and the ways it communicates. But those choices are, inevitably, compromises. If those choices alienate too many participants, we lose both their valuable input, and we lose some of our legitimacy as a consensus-building organization that claims to be open to broad participation.
Keith
