Chuq Von Rospach <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Which is being done, both with text/html as part of a text/alternative,
> and with Qualcomm and their text/flowed stuff.
This is a somewhat pedantic correction, but it's actually important to a
MIME parser. It's text/plain; format=flowed, not text/flowed.
text/flowed would defeat the entire point, since it couldn't be treated as
text/plain by MTAs that don't understand the format parameter.
And it's not entirely correct to call it Qualcomm's, or at least any more
correct than it is to call text/enriched Qualcomm's. It's a published RFC
and is implemented by several other MUAs as well.
> 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.
Unfortunately, all of the alternatives people are playing with seem to
also be SGML derivatives, which means we seem likely to continue to be
stuck with one of the worst markup syntaxes ever designed by the mind of
man. But don't mind me; I'm just bitter.
> 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.
The nice thing about PDF is that it really *is* a page layout language and
gives you that sort of control without abusing HTML in order to do it.
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
