At 3:41 PM -0400 6/26/2000, Bernie Cosell wrote:
>Maybe... but one problem is that it only handles 'sections' and that's
>pretty limiting [unless you use MIME *SOLELY* as a wrapper and then come
>up with some other actual-message-format that you embed in a MIME
>section].
Which is being done, both with text/html as part of a
text/alternative, and with Qualcomm and their text/flowed stuff.
>And of course, you'll then run into my biggest gripe aboue where all this
>is going: the heir apparent to the enhanced-email encoding (once we redo
>RFC822 et seq to make it _carry_ this stuff more gracefully) is HTML and
>is the most depressing part.
I tend to disagree. I think HTML is a bridge to something else, we
just don't know what it is yet.
HTML is simple and resiliant, if not always great. So it's fairly
easy to use and implement. But if you look at the HTML space,
everyone's running around looking for something better, whether it's
DHTML, XML or fredML. Tehy just haven't agreed on what that is yet. I
expect the same thing will happen in the e-mail space, trailing the
HTML world.
Or maybe it'll split and go sideways. As we continue to mainstream a
broadband environment, an interesting argument could be made to move
to a PDF-based imaging model. I'm not necessarily suggesting we do,
and I certainly don't plan on leading the way, but PDF brings a lot
of positives, the main negative being message size. And it's cross
platform and pretty endemic out there.
But I'm guessing we'll have 18 months or so breathing room before the
next technological wave hits e-mail. Or maybe I'm just hoping.
--
Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar
and say 'Man, what are you doing here?'"
