You're not yet convincing me (though that probably doesn't matter);
repeating my arguments would be obnoxious (or worse: boring!), so I
won't. Let's try a different approach: what's the ideal here? Here's
my answer: a plethora of interfaces to the same data (posts/threads).
I'd like to see:
- RSS/Atom feeds
- web UIs ("web forum" UIs)
- stable HTTP APIs
- mobile apps specifically for fora (probably based on HTTP APIs)
- e-mail interface (mailing list)
- archives that can be downloaded, as well as searched online
- maybe even Usenet bridging
I believe all of that can be achieved with a mailing list as the
underlying method of organizing the data, though this does force
posters to have e-mail addresses as IDs (not necessarily routable, but
ideally routable -- any authentication method that uses an
RFC822-style e-mail address as ID form should suffice for any
non-e-mail interface to the forum).
Tell me why a mailing list cannot be the foundation for such an ideal,
or how/why your ideal is so different from mine that a mailing list
cannot be the foundation for it. I might be so blinded by my
allegiance to mailing lists that I can't see a better ideal without
your help.
I suppose you could argue that plain text is bad, and that mailing
lists encourage plain text, therefore they're bad -- but from my point
of view plain text (not ASCII, but Unicode), particularly fixed-width
fonts (at least for scripts where that makes any sense) is *ideal* as
it makes it much easier to format readable posts, particularly for
technical subjects. But there's always MIME and HTML anyways, so that
an argument against plain text can't be a solid argument against
mailing lists as the foundation for the above ideal.
Nico
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