This conversation reminds me of a conversation about microcomputers I
had with some engineers at Duke University about microcomputers in
1978. After several hours of discussion about how we could provide
services to microcomputer users one of the engineers allowed as he
didn't take all of this too seriously because 'personal computing was a
poor use of a computer chip.'
Reality is that HTML is here and people are using it. It hardly matters
if it is 'optimal' or not. It's a standard and is a reality. If we
worried about 'optimality' in everything we did the internet wouldn't
exist because we would never agree on protocol standards. As usual, the
first guy out of the blocks sets the standard and in this case it's
HTML.
It hardly matters if people 'should' do it or not. The fact is that
they are doing it and that we, as basically support for what our users
and subscribers want to do (hmm -- I'll bet that treads on a few egos,)
need to adapt our ways and our software to provide that support.
Our subscribers are not going to wait around for us to find an optimal
solution. Email software developers aren't interested in developing new
markup languages or different modes of expressivity. They make money
because they write for what is out there now rather than for some
theoretical optimality. You and I may not like it, but the reality is
we don't have much choice in the matter. We don't do our job if we dig
in our feet and refuse to acknowledge what is patently obvious.
--Byron
