Theodore Ts'o <tytso@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> But what you are proposing is not requiring plain text, but some> artificial HTML subset/profile. And that might actually be a lot
> harder compared with sending plain text [...]
A subset/profile is what every RSS reader does, and this format is not too different from email or usenet. For example, you can try to send a <script> element in a feed. Most feed web views will have scripting disabled. Even if that's misconfigured, most feed parsers will have all sorts of other guards to prevent anything really unusual. They use an allow-list of HTML elements and CSS rules. The <script> element is not in there, of course.
Of course, web browsers also behave this way, although they allow more content.
It probably doesn't help that ">" is the quotation character that starts a line, and people might read messages in web mail clients. That's just bug habitat.
Even after all that, I still don't see email fixing this problem outside of plain text. I think the MIMI charter is more hopeful:
Can you have threads? Seems vaguely in scope.
thanks,
Rob
