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

["Amanda Walker" <amanda@intercon.com>]

Tim May writes:
> "Actual" terminals is not the issue, but "virtual" terminals *is*. 
> I haven't done a poll lately, or ever in fact, but my hunch is that 70% 
> of the list is emulating some form of terminal, e.g., a VT-100 or 102, 
> or maybe something slightly more exotic. Or a shell program, as in 
> America Online, which has its own standard. 

I'd actually be interested in a poll, but I know better than to actually ask 
for one :).

> Perry made the same point that Amanda makes, that my Macintosh _should 
> be_ usable as a graphics system, not just for ASCII text. Well, I 
> agree, but so what? 

I have to admit some bias here--our flagship product for the Macintosh 
contains a very MIME-aware mailer (which I am working on making crypto-aware 
as well), and which was designed to make MIME seamless.  No helper software, 
no extracting pieces and finding a viewer for them, it just works.

> I note that all of Perry's messages, and most 
> of Amanda's messages, fit this ASCII model. 

In my case, it's because I intentionally make them fit.  Most mailing lists 
have a general expectation of plain ASCII.  When I send mail to other people 
at InterCon, I (and the recipients) see something that looks like any other 
Mac document--nice formatting, diagrams and screen shots displayed inline, and 
so on.  And when someone sends me a file via email, even if they're not using 
a MIME mailer, it shows up as an icon I can drag to a folder in the Finder.

This isn't really a commercial for my product, though :).  This is how I think 
MIME was meant to be implemented, and it's analogous to how I think encryption 
should be implemented.  Forget helper applications, macros, and so on.  There 
should be two popup menus on the envelope: "sign with" and "encrypt with".  
When you select them, you get prompted for your passphrase, and it just works.  

This is the same direction that other commercial vendors are headed, and it's 
this kind of simplicity that I think will finally get people to start using 
the technology (just as with MIME).  On this, I suspect the Netscape folks and 
I are in violent agreement :), as probably are you from some of your comments 
to this list...

> (The MIME stuff I'm not saying shouldn't be used, just that some of 
> us--perhaps most of us, is my hunch--will not be adopting the 
> latest bleeding edge technology.

Right now, PGP is more of a bleeding edge technology than MIME is, IMHO.

> Finally, Amanda mentioned "being away from out desks." Well, many of 
> us are _always_ away from our desks when we post. From home machines, 
> not from T3-connected Indigos on our desk. 

Indeed, that's why I brought it up; at the moment, I'm sitting in my study at 
home posting over a dialup (14.4K) PPP link.  I've also posted from 37,000 
feet sitting in a DC-10 (in coach :)), with my mail being queued up until I 
could jack into a phone when I land.

> One thing I would like very much is the ability to include simple 
> diagrams and drawings in my posts, but this is clearly an _
> unsolved_ problem, from a practical point of view.

Hmm.  I'd say it's a partially solved problem.  Newsgroups like 
clari.features.dilbert are popular enough that there's at least a significant 
fraction of people who can handle MIME messages with embedded graphics.

> and ask yourself where all these posts-with-diagrams are 
> if they're so easy to do.) 

Well, I could start posting some, if you want existence proofs :)...


Amanda Walker
InterCon Systems Corporation