begin quoting kelsey hudson as of Thu, Jan 11, 2007 at 09:55:31AM -0800: [snip] > The problem is that email is a (poorly-designed) old 7-bit technology
Your criticism is unjust. It was better than any of the alternatives at the time, and has survived numerous challenges without significant redesign. I think there was some pretty good design in there, despite the problems that have arisen. Maybe not perfect, but good enough... > broken and adapted to 8-bit, extended via a hack called MIME, and > expected to work everywhere. 7 bit ASCII *does* work everywhere.... "Not pretty" != "Doesn't work". > There are no real fundamental standards and > it seems like the "standards" that are in place keep changing. Then you > have vendors (*AHEM*microsoft*AHEM*) who ignore all of this and do it > their own way. So it's a lose-lose situation no matter how you look at it. So... throw away _all_ of the hacks, both the ones that Microsoft (rightly) rejects and the ones that they introduce themselves. I don't _want_ multimedia features in my email. > Bottom line: we need a new standard for electronic mail, it's just that > the ones that have been proposed either a) suck b) nobody pays attention > to them c) both of the above d) really suck. > > Intractable problem, anyone? Ill-defined problem, rather. Nobody really agrees as to what the replacement _should_ do. Should it support arbitrary glyphs, and give the sender full control over the appearance of the message? Some say yes, and others cry out "hell no!". Should it preserve anonymity or impair junkmailers? Or should special consideration to making the content machine-friendly? On and on and on.... -- Sometimes, the best tools aren't the shiny ones. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
