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

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.
:)

Jonathan Rochkind wrote:

> >(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.

Agreed, and I think my follow-up clarified my claim that the Web is
the likely successor to standard e-mail.

I think a generation exposed to Mosaic and similar browsers will want
to find ways to use these windows into the Net for _nearly
everything_. They will not want to buy or learn separate mail
programs, negotiate separate accounts, or deal with MIME sorts of
issues. They will ask for, and get, "gateways" between mail and the
Web. (Gateways may not be the right word.)

(We see this already, on the CP list, with Web pages containing the
Cypherpunks list, with Web versions of my FAQ, etc. In the next few
months, let alone the next few years, I expect to see more and more
people reading the list via someone's Web pages. Maybe their own,
maybe someone else's, etc.)

> 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.
> :)

I'm not sure what "deprecate the web" means here. I use "lynx" fairly
regularly to retrieve stuff, and think it's pretty useful. I'm also a
prime candidate for getting Netscape, when a few things stabilize (I
won't say what, as that will then trigger the "Why don't you use X?"
sorts of comments I get).

My main point is that the most compelling strategy seems to be to
stick with ASCII for a while, avoid minor-but-painful gains with
Postscript, Acrobat, Replica, TeX, FrameViewer, etc., and then jump to
the Web/html/http/blah blah when the time is right.

--Tim May


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Timothy C. May wrote:B
> My main point is that the most compelling strategy seems to be to
> stick with ASCII for a while, avoid minor-but-painful gains with
> Postscript, Acrobat, Replica, TeX, FrameViewer, etc., and then jump to
> the Web/html/http/blah blah when the time is right.

I have noticed that folks with a Unix background have a rather
higher tolerance for stuff that sort of works, most of the time,
if you fiddle enough, than folks with Dos/Windows/Mac background

I suspect brain damage caused by a "make" utility that treats
spaces as semanticly different from tabs.  AAargh!

:-)

(But I am not an operating system bigot, I will freely admit
that segments and REPE CMPS have led to disturbing mental
symptoms amongst us PC folk.)

But seriously folks, GUI tools for manipulating and communicating
information are just wonderfully superior.  MIME etc provides a
standard for such things.

Problem is of course that it does not yet provide an entirely
satisfactory reality.  The standard is not yet standard.

Which is why you are probably reading this in a monospaced
font with hard carriage returns, rather than the proportionally
spaced font and soft line breaks that you get in the WWW


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