Subject: HTML email

From: Timothy Mcsweeney <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2020 10:42:43 -0500 (EST)

Well it looks like all my previous emails are in markup.  I guess I will have to reload every single email in its text version.

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From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2020 11:10:21 -0500

On Wed, Nov 11, 2020 at 10:43 AM Timothy Mcsweeney <[email-masked]>
wrote:

> Well it looks like all my previous emails are in markup.  I guess I will
> have to reload every single email in its text version.
>

When Nathaniel Borenstein originally proposed MIME, he tried to persuade
people to adopt a rich text markup. That failed and he was criticized for
it, but he was right.

HTML/2.0 would have been an excellent basis for rich text markup. It
provides essentially the same capabilities Nathaniel proposed which are
similar to those supported by Gmail and Medium and Markdown.

Today's HTML is not a structured markup. It has been turned into a
presentation markup, not a structured markup. And it really doesn't work at
all well. Responding to messages in the wrong client can result in
ludicrously tiny or huge text.

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From: Timothy Mcsweeney <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2020 11:17:10 -0500 (EST)

Yesterday all my emails were readable on mailarchive.ietf.org and today they are not.  go figure.  I guess everybody gets to read them again!  haha

> On 11/11/2020 11:10 AM Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, Nov 11, 2020 at 10:43 AM Timothy Mcsweeney <[email-masked]> wrote:
> When Nathaniel Borenstein originally proposed MIME, he tried to persuade people to adopt a rich text markup. That failed and he was criticized for it, but he was right.
> 
> HTML/2.0 would have been an excellent basis for rich text markup. It provides essentially the same capabilities Nathaniel proposed which are similar to those supported by Gmail and Medium and Markdown.
> 
> Today's HTML is not a structured markup. It has been turned into a presentation markup, not a structured markup. And it really doesn't work at all well. Responding to messages in the wrong client can result in ludicrously tiny or huge text.
> 
>

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From: Benjamin Kaduk <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2020 09:33:04 -0800

Hi Tim,

> Yesterday all my emails were readable on mailarchive.ietf.org and today they are not.  go figure.  I guess everybody gets to read them again!  haha

One might have assumed that this was due to a bug on the archive service
that could be fixed in ways other than manually resending all your
messages.  Without threading context or other peoples' messages, it's not
clear that they will make much sense as they appear in the archives in text
form.

-Ben

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From: Timothy Mcsweeney <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2020 12:34:08 -0500 (EST)

> On 11/11/2020 10:42 AM Timothy Mcsweeney <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
>

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From: Robert Sparks <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2020 12:18:52 -0600

That is totally unnecessary and unwarranted. A bug report (and a few 
minutes to take action on it) would have been a much better approach.