Quoth Tomas Fasth on Wed, Oct 06, 1999:
> Philip Hazel wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, 6 Oct 1999, Paul Makepeace wrote:
> >
> > > "Your message didn't get delivered as well as you might've hoped. Here's why
> > > http://mta.mycom.tld/oops.cgi?lang=en&code=552&msgid="
> >
> > I'm sorry. That would annoy me.
[snip]
> I tend to agree. But in the same time, there's a beauty in Paul's
> suggestion, in that he propose to rely on a presentation technique
> that is capable of supporting multiple languages.
This should be done in the MUA. If a machine-readable bounce
format is developed (while still preserving himan-readable text
_in the beginning of the bounce message_), then your local MUA
(Suahili version) will translate it for you.
[HTML in e-mail]
> So, you want to keep it simple. I also like it simple. Unfortunately
> the world wide reality is usually not quite that simple. When you
> mention non-ASCII as if it's something undesirable I cannot help
> associating to my native language, which happen to be Swedish.
Russian and Hebrew here (hah!). But then, you have iso8859-x
quoted-printable. It's not ASCII, but it's not what Philip meant
in his rant on non-ASCII based e-mail (as far as I understood).
> In that regard, MIME is a good thing, not a bad one. And with
> MIME comes HTML capability.
Does it come with GIF capability and text/troff-me capability as
well? Why don't we just mail each other messages written in
troff with -me macros, then? Or gzipped screaming video?
> More over, the only viable long term
> replacement of ASCII is Unicode. HTML is engineered to support
> Unicode. Do I need to say more?
When (and if) Unicode is widely accepted and ASCII is gone away,
we all will just send mail in our native languages without any
HTML support. Even now, you can send mail in iso8859-1 (or
iso8859-8, or koi8-r, or whatever).
> > I read my email using Pine on Unix. I now never bother to look
> > at gratuitous attachments in HTML (or anything else, for that matter).
>
> The Pine developers always have the choice of supporting HTML in a
> similar fashion as Lynx does.
Why? And why not translate GIFs into ASCII art, while we're at
it? It's better just run $BROWSER from the mail reader.
> > [It's different if the message says "here's an attached
> > document/webpage/binary for your attention".]
>
> I general, I think the trend is to publish your documents on the net,
> and only sending hyperlinks to those it concerns.
Right.
> > I'm probably an old-fashioned dinosaur (having been around rather a long
> > time), but I don't like complexity just for the sake of it.
>
> Even dinosaurs have to adjust to a changing environment (the real
> ones never got the chance though 8)
But let's not jump on new shiny tools just because we can.
Vadik.
--
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into
superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
-- G. B. Shaw
