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

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Don't freak with the address... I'm moving.  Check the sig if you're paranoid.

Tim's wise words were:

>The issue is not unwillingness to use new technology, it is, rather,
>the issue of "stable attractors." That is, what can I/we reasonably
>expect others to also have. Clearly if I issued my paper to the list
>in FrameMaker format, or Acrobat format, or even TeX format, only a
>few people would be able to read it. Fewer still would actually take
>the steps needed to actually display the paper.
>
>Standards, standards, standards!
>
>I don't think the minor extensions to e-mail (loosely called "MIME,"
>though MIME serves other functions besides attaching graphics) are
>worth the effort, frankly. Most of the MIME messages (the ones that
>tell me about "ISO 558972 fonts" and "Press any key to return") don't
>seem to warrant the effort....I think in 90%+ of the cases people
>simply send messages as MIME by default, not becuase non-ASCII stuff
>is included.

Well, ignoring the fact that MIME appears to be infiltrating the Web as well...

I would differ with your analysis of MIME's lack of usefulness.  It does
provide a possible way to integrate PGP into the mail/Web landscape (from a
crypto standpoint).  Multimedia I'm not so sure about; I think the big draw
to MIME will come when Person A drags and drops a spreadsheet into a MIME
mailer and sends the message to Person B, who then clicks on an icon to pull
up the spreadsheet.  But I digress...

I'd say, however, that MIME isn't a done deal yet, though it's getting
there.  Until it's there, it's probably a bad idea.  It's been my experience
that many mailers are just MIME-compliant enough to cause their users lots
of headaches.

(As I write this, I notice I'm using Eudora, which MIMEs all its stuff.  Oh,
well; I hope this message isn't too much trouble for y'all...)

>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.

I vote for MIME-encoded cave drawings. :-)

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Jeff Licquia wrote:

> Well, ignoring the fact that MIME appears to be infiltrating the Web as well...
> 
> I would differ with your analysis of MIME's lack of usefulness.  It does
> provide a possible way to integrate PGP into the mail/Web landscape (from a
> crypto standpoint).  Multimedia I'm not so sure about; I think the big draw
> to MIME will come when Person A drags and drops a spreadsheet into a MIME
> mailer and sends the message to Person B, who then clicks on an icon to pull
> up the spreadsheet.  But I digress...

My issue has not been with MIME as a transport mechanism, but
non-ASCII content, which clearly most folks can't read.

> I'd say, however, that MIME isn't a done deal yet, though it's getting
> there.  Until it's there, it's probably a bad idea.  It's been my experience
> that many mailers are just MIME-compliant enough to cause their users lots
> of headaches.

Amen! This is the same point several people have made in follow-ups. 

The whole bit about transferring spreadsheets is nice--we've been able
to do it on the Mac for many years, provided both sides have the right
spreadsheet programs of course--but it's not of much use in
communicating as we do on a mailing list. And "true MIME" is not what
many so-called "MIMEs" apparently are.

> (As I write this, I notice I'm using Eudora, which MIMEs all its stuff.  Oh,
> well; I hope this message isn't too much trouble for y'all...)

It wasn't marked as Mime, and it gave me no trouble. Perhaps becuase
looking at your headers reveals:

X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Version 1.4.3
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"


I think the Content-Type field is the key.

Is this the answer? Not completely. Part of the whole "complexity"
issue I've been railing about (and echoed by such noted Neo-Luddites
as Phil Zimmermann, John Markoff, and others) is that increasing
numbers of messages need special processing, hang up my automatic
downloading (as when my Eudora hangs in the middle of a long transfer,
asking for instructions on how to handle an exception or special case,
and Netcom hangs me up, forcing me to start over later and then
babysit the transfer process so I can be there when Eudora hollers for
help), and generally complicate our lives more than they help.

Would Einstein have wasted his time trying to configure his mailer so
he could see Amanda's GIF? (No offense meant, Amanda.))



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Timothy C. May says:
> My issue has not been with MIME as a transport mechanism, but
> non-ASCII content, which clearly most folks can't read.

Far from clear, Tim. Last time I checked, almost no one I communicated
with regularly was using a machine without a pixmapped display. That
means that all standing in the way of them being able to read
non-ascii is the right font sitting on disk, and a program that groks
it.

Perry

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In article <9412161424.AA02172@snark.imsi.com>, you wrote:
> 
> Timothy C. May says:
> > My issue has not been with MIME as a transport mechanism, but
> > non-ASCII content, which clearly most folks can't read.
> 
> Far from clear, Tim. Last time I checked, almost no one I communicated
> with regularly was using a machine without a pixmapped display. That
> means that all standing in the way of them being able to read
> non-ascii is the right font sitting on disk, and a program that groks
> it.

The right font on disk and a program that groks it.  Aye, there's the
rub. 

What makes this debate at once so fascinating and so frustrating is that
both sides are correct.

Yes, MIME is the standard that has emerged for exchanging non-ascii-text
data via email, and yes it's a damned good one, properly implemented. 
And yes, anyone with the resources to do so ought to connect to their
Internet service provider through a SLIP connection and be able to
move through the Web with a good graphical browser and view their mail
through their MIME-compliant mail program.  If you can do it, then it is
without a doubt the way to go.

But at the same time Tim is right, too.  SLIP connections, quality
Web browsers, and MIME-compliant email packages are the high end of Net
access today.  They demand either an investment of money (intelligently
spent) or an investment of effort to get the stuff up and running and to
get the know-how needed to do so.  Either of these can be more than many
people who are now Internet users can afford.

I think the people who are berating Tim for his apparent stubbornness
should stop and think for a bit.  It's not a simple matter of "We're
right, so Tim must be wrong."  The people who can look at the matter and
see how the MIME advocates and Tim May are both right, without seeing a
contradiction, will have a broader, deeper insight into the underlying
problems, and be able to come up with solutions that reach farther.

                          | For me, to be a feminist is to answer the
   Alan Bostick           | question "Are women human?" with a yes.
   abostick@netcom.com    | 
finger for PGP public key |      Katha Pollitt, REASONABLE CREATURES
Key fingerprint:          | 
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Alan Bostick says:
> SLIP connections, quality
> Web browsers, and MIME-compliant email packages are the high end of Net
> access today.

Hardly. I was at a party last friday night where the host had a T1
into his home, and numerous workstations on the home network. That
counts as "high end", I'd say. Running a router, firewall and a
network of workstations does indeed require skill. However...

> They demand either an investment of money (intelligently
> spent) or an investment of effort to get the stuff up and running and to
> get the know-how needed to do so.

Given that you can get a SLIP account just as easily as a shell
account (i.e. call a provider) and that terminal software is not
notably simpler to configure than SLIP or PPP software (anyone who
thinks otherwise should try explaining what "seven bits, even parity"
or "vt100 emulation" means to a liberal arts major) I'd say that the
arguments being made are specious. They are based on the conjectures
of people who haven't tried, rather than on the experience of those
who have. With a package like "Chameleon", getting a PPP connection
going is a matter of typing in a phone number and a couple of other
magic values to a pretty friendly on-screen form -- which is more or
less the level of effort needed to get a terminal emulator up and
running. It might be different effort -- and certain people like Tim
who are set in their ways might think of the tiny difference as a huge
barrier -- but its not a particularly large effort. As for the money,
these programs are not notably more expensive than commercial terminal
emulators.

I'd say, in fact, that running via SLIP or PPP is a SMALLER investment
in time and effort because for the naive user running native
applications on their machine with the native help and windowing
systems running is probably a much more comfortable situation than
trying to run "elm" via a weird terminal emulator program.

And yes, I've some experience at what the naive users are like.

There are now boxes you can get from your local bookstore that contain
everything you need -- software, online signup, etc -- to get a PPP or
SLIP connection to the net. I'd say that the kvetching is all just
plain wrong.

Perry