On Mon, 7 Nov 1994, Steve Dorner wrote:
The flip side of the coin is that I really do NOT think that raw enriched
or raw RTF are going to be acceptable to any but the geekiest of geeks.
Certainly if quoted-printable is any indication. :-(
Raw HTML is a bit different, because it contains URL's that everyone seems
to want so desperately.
I suggested some time ago that maybe we should dump text/enriched in
favour of text/html since that seems to be the way most of the world is
going. Even when URL's are not required, I think HTML is still useful for
doing e-mail markup and lots of users will accept it because it is
currently the "cool" thing to do.
Alternatively:
User: This text/enriched garbage is terrible. Get rid of it.
Implementor: Would you prefer HTML for nicely formatted text?
User: Yes!
Implementor: Well, text/enriched is (for all intents and purposes)
HTML without the URL's and most messages do not need URL's.
Do you still want me to get rid of text/enriched?
User: Oh.
:-)
We can never please everybody. I think it's time we put our foot down
once and for all:
Upgrade or Perish!
Those who continue to refuse to upgrade will get left behind more and
more. Sooner or later we are going to have to draw the line. We cannot
be supporting older UA's forever. We can nicely format our text/enriched,
quoted-printable, etc, which will help in the transition, but in the end
we need to stop catering to software which is not capable of meeting
today's e-mail needs.
We've put our foot down on base64 vs uuencode. It's time to do it on some
other aspects of MIME too.
Cheers,
Rhys.