johnjohn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Quite frankly, I wouldn't use the resulting mailer unless you also
> embedded a JVM, a Perl interpreter, and an ASCII VRML renderer.
At which point it will be suitable for merging with emacs. ;)
My general comment on this thread is that I think people should pay a lot
of attention to Chuq's point about decent tools and documentation. The
currently problem with HTML and MIME in e-mail is *not* the standards.
Yes, I agree, HTML has a lot of flaws as a formatting language and it's
not particularly well-designed for e-mail (there's a *lot* of literature
on this subject; the major problem is that HTML doesn't deal with
attributed quoted text containing other HTML elements very well, and
quoting is a major portion of e-mail), but honestly we've made do with a
lot worse. Having a *standard* is often much more important than having
the standard be ideally suited to the application.
Consider telnet, for example. telnet option negotiation is hopelessly
complex by the standards of what most modern systems could deal with,
given that it was designed for a day and age where one had to deal with
vast arrays of horribly incompatible equipment, but it's a standard and it
still works reasonably well.
The problem with both HTML and MIME use in e-mail is that we've not yet
successfully encapsulated and hidden the complexities of the tool inside
something that's reasonably easy to use and makes sense to the average
user, like we did a long time ago with telnet. They can do some great
stuff, but no one knows how to use them right yet. And the early adopters
are mostly badly *misusing* them, which is creating a confrontational
atmosphere that's really unnecessary.
I used to hate MIME. Thought it was an utter abomination, horribly
misdesigned, and never wanted to use it. I've come around. I've seen the
light. Why?
Because someone showed me a MIME implementation that didn't suck, and
proved that the annoyances could be encapsulated and hidden. And you
know, once they are, you can do some really cool stuff with MIME. It
works great. You just have to give some thought to your implementation
and make sure it makes sense to the *user* and the user doesn't have to
deal with the annoyances of it, neither does the recipient of their mail,
and the degredation of presentation for a recipient who doesn't understand
MIME is graceful.
Unfortunately, Netscape, Outlook Express, Eudora, and the like have not
yet put that level of thought and understanding into their
implementations, so their MIME implementations still suck. But that
doesn't mean that MIME sucks. And we're getting there.
I actually have a reasonable amount of confidence in the growth of
standards. I'm personally somewhat annoyed at how much complexity is
accruing on even the simplest protocols, and I'm very worried that we're
not setting up the infrastructure we're going to need to be able to handle
that complexity in a reasonable fashion (and continuously more buggy
software is the first symptom of that), but I have some faith that we'll
work it out.
The world is changing again. That's not a bad thing. Yes, the IMAP
protocol is a bletcherous nightmare of syntax compared to POP3, but if you
manage to dig through all that syntax, it actually lets you do some cool
stuff POP3 doesn't. It's the same with MIME, and it's the same with HTML.
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
