Re: McCoy is Right! New Mail Format to Start Now.

[jrochkin@cs.oberlin.edu (Jonathan Rochkind)]

At 3:12 PM 12/15/94, Timothy C. May wrote:
>If we make the leap, I say make the leap to the Web:
>
>cave drawings --> text --> e-mail --> Web
>
>(By Web I of course mean the whole ball of wax involving HTML/HTTP/etc.)
>
>This is not a rejection of new technology, just a wise selection of
>which technology to bet on.

HTTP and email, serve different transport purposes.  I don't think I really
need to explain in what ways they are different, because we all know.
Suffice it to say that mailing lists work better as a mailing list then it
ever could as a web page, even with forms and all that stuff.  A mailing
list is a different transport-method choice then HTTP is.

But there's no reason why you couldn't mail html documents.  html isn't a
"transport" choice, but a "content" choice. Maybe in the future all of our
mail readers will be able to render html, and people will send html mail,
with anchors and ordered lists and whatever else.  That's something I think
is likely to happen, eventually.  Email and HTTP are transport mechanisms,
whereas html and ascii text (which of course is a subset of html) are
content formats. And MIME is a mechanism for describing what types of
content formats are contained in the message, whether the message is a
usenet article, a piece of email, or a web page.   A given "transmission"
of course can't be both email and HTTP, but it could be email and use MIME
and be html.  Or be http and mime and html.

I don't think we'll ever stop using email in favor of the web and HTTP,
because they serve different purposes.  I don't think Tim really does
thinks we'll stop using email either, since I've heard him deprecate the
web several times.  He is just trying to convince us not to use MIME (or
html for that matter) in email we send to the list, and thinks maybe this
argument will convince us and not result in us calling him a technophobe.
:)