Re: [ietf-822] Review of and suggested changes for draft-crocker-inreply

+1 mostly.  Or should I say, 👍.   As usual your analysis is excellent.

But you say that a MIME part with “Content-Disposition: reaction” should have 
its contents restricted to UTF-8 emoji.  Most likely some implementors will 
ignore that and include additional UTF-8 text, or worse, pictures or video.  
How should a conformant implementation handle that?  It seems like this creates 
an excellent opportunity for bad implementations to help people send content 
that might never be displayed to the recipient.  Although it will be the fault 
of the sending implementation, the consequences will be experienced by the 
readers more than the senders, so it could be hard to even notice, let alone 
get fixed.

I’m not sure we should dismiss out of hand the “text/reaction” idea.  
Conformant implementations will treat it as a reaction — a new thing.   What 
does it really matter whether nonconformant implementations treat it as 
text/plain or application/octet-stream?  Either way, it won’t have any special 
automatic reaction processing, and it will make the content available to the 
user either as readable text or an attachment that the user is at least told 
exists.  Sure, application/octet-stream is the wrong choice, but it’s no more 
wrong than it has been all along for unrecognized text subtypes.  In fact, if 
this gives us a reaction mechanism that works for everything but Microsoft and 
Google, it might actually spur those companies to start doing the right thing 
with unrecognized text subtypes in general.  (OK, I wouldn’t bet the farm on 
that, but you never know.)

These are just my reactions, I’m not yet sure what I think is the right answer. 
 — Nathaniel


> On Oct 21, 2020, at 8:43 AM, Ned Freed 
> <ned(_dot_)freed(_at_)mrochek(_dot_)com> wrote:
>
> One of the interesting things about the Internet standards process is how
> often a particular implementation creates the architectural model, rather than
> the other way around.
>
> This specification is a case in point. It starts by offering three key
> insights:
>
> (1) It's possible to tease the design of a generic "reaction" facility out
>    of various social media systems.
>
> (2) Restricting the system to emoji, or a even subset of emoji, is essential
>    to the viability of the facility.
>
> (3) Given (1) and (2), it's possible to add a reaction capability to existing
>    messaging systems, even one as well established as email.
>
> All of these insights seem obvious in hindsight, but I for one have never
> really thought about them, or about extending email in this way. As such, I
> applaud Dave for coming up with this proposal.
>
> However, like so many previous proposals, the specification now shifts rather
> abruptly to implementation specifics, using an approach based on existing
> header-based mechanisms like X-Face. And this is where things start to get a
> little iffy.
>
> First of all, I think there's at least one more key insight that we need to
> pull out of existing reaction facilities: In many if not most cases they
> operate independently of reply messages. Indeed, this is what makes them so
> attractive: As a user I can offer an opinion of something without having to
> write anything. I just click on a button, up comes a panel of emoji, I make a
> selection, done. (Yes, I realize this is a UI detail, and we don't do UIs,
> but it's such an important capability that it warrants our attention.)
>
> And this isn't simply a matter of being lazy - although the virtues of
> laziness often fail to be appreciated. The separation of reactions from
> replies makes it possible to implement very different sorts of workflows.
> The obvious example is voting - most reaction interfaces provide the
> tally you need of user reactions automatically, whereas with replies the
> tally has to be done manually - exactly the sort of things computers are
> supposed to do for us.
>
> Second, as everyone knows, I am one of the authors of MIME, and one of the
> key elements of MIME was backwards compatibility with non-MIME systems. I
> firmly believe this is one of the things that made MIME succesful, so it's
> something I worry about in every new proposal that comes along.
>
> Returning to the current document, I believe the proposed implementation
> doesn't adequately address either of these points, and that there are
> alternatives that do.
>
> In particular, the current proposal creates a reaction mechanism that's
> independent of replies but then requires that a reply be sent in order to
> send a reaction. This linkage makes it very awkward to use the mechanism
> for things like voting - having a long list of meaningless replies show up
> as part of a vote is definitely not a Good Thing.
>
> Of course it's possible to define a semantic where, say, an empty message body
> in conjunction with a reaction header, would be silently ignored. But this
> brings us to the second point: Backwards compatibility. If this proposal 
> starts
> to deploy it will be into a world where no client is aware of the meaning of
> this new reaction header field. Now consider what this will look like in an
> unextended client: A bunch of empty replies. Definitely Not Good.
>
> Other alternatives fare no better: Clients won't know what to do with a
> "ignore" content-disposition, and will ignore it rather than the message.
> Ditto for a text/ignore content type.
>
> But there is one thing that does work, which is put the reaction in the
> message body. This way clients that don't implement the reaction facility 
> will 
> display something, and it's actually pretty sensible.
>
> Putting the reaction in the message body solves an even bigger backwards
> compatibility problem: The least astonishment principle violation that occurs
> when the participants in a discussion with upgraded clients see a bunch of
> reactions but those without upgraded clients see nothing at all.
>
> The current document does provide the option to do this: It says clients
> MAY include a copy of the reaction in the message body. But making this
> optional leads to even more unpredictability.
>
> But if we always put the reaction in the message body, the header field is now
> superfluous. So let's proceed on the assumption that the reaction will be
> in the message body - and only in the message body - and see how far we get.
>
> MIME provides us with multipart messages, so the obvious thing to do is
> put the reaction in its own part. This however, brings us face to face
> with our first real problem: How do we combine a reaction with a reply? If
> the reply is text/plain then there's a simple solution: Use multipart/mixed
> containing the two parts. (Tests show this actually works pretty well.)
>
> What if the reply is text/html? multipart/alternative? multipart/related?
> If past experience with client MIME support is any indication, complex
> nested MIME structures are best avoided. But in this case we have a
> simple alternative: Combine if you can, but if you can't send two
> messages!
>
> So now the rule would be for conforming clients to look for a
> reaction part and process it as such. Processing terminates if the
> message consists solely of that part. If not, process the remainder as
> a reply.
>
> The next issue is really more of a detail: How do we label a part as a
> reaction? One way to do it is to define a new Content- field,
> say Content-Reaction. This is pretty much guaranteed to work. But it would
> be nice if we could do this using existing Content- fields. And we have
> at least two of those: Content-type and Content-Disposition.
>
> A text/reaction media type makes quite a bit of sense - we are, after all,
> restricting the repertoire to emoji, so this isn't really text/plain. And
> there are other media types, e.g., multipart/related, that exist solely to
> invoke specialized client handling. Finally, RFC 2045 section 4.1.4
> quite specifically states that unknown subtypes of text should be handled
> as text/plain, providing the necessary fallback behavior.
>
> Unfortunately a bit of testing shows that section 4.1.4 has apparently been
> ignored by at least two major mail service providers - they both treat
> text/reaction as application/octet-stream. (Bad Google. Bad Microsoft.
> Bad.)
>
> I guess we could stand on principle that this is clearly a standards violation
> and proceed with the media type, but why fight a fight we are almost certain
> to lose when there are viable alternatives?
>
> So how about a reaction content-disposition? This seems to work well -
> unknown content-dispositions look like they are ignored. (Or maybe nobody
> is currently paying attention to disposition information, which is also
> fine for our purposes.)
>
> My suggestion, then, is to switch from a header field to a MIME part
> with a content-disposition of "reaction"", a content-type of text/plain,
> UTF-8 charset, and contents restricted to emoji. Combine the reaction with
> a reply if you can, if can't send it as a separate message.
>
> The current document is pleasantly short, so it's possible for me to
> suggest a set of changes to implement this suggestion:
>
> OLD:
>
>   This facility defines a header field, to be used in junction with the
>   In-Reply-To header field, to link one or more emojis as a summary
>   reaction to a previous message.
>
> NEW:
>
>   This facility defines a new content-disposition, to be used in conjunction
>   with the In-Reply-To header field, to specify that a part of a message
>   containing one or more emojis be treated as a summary reaction to a
>   previous message.
>
> OLD:
>
> 2.  In-Reply-React
>
>   A message sent as a reply MAY indicate the responder's summary
>   reaction to the original message by including an In-Reply-React
>   header field:
>
>   The [ABNF] for the header field is:
>
> in-reply-react = "In-Reply-React:" emoji *(lwsp emoji) CRLF
>
> emoji = emoji_sequence
> emoji_sequence = { defined in [Emoji-Seq] }
>
> base-emojis = thumbs-up / thumbs-down / grinning-face / frowning-face /
> crying-face
>
> thumbs-up = {U+1F44D}
> thumbs-down = {U+1F44E}
> grinning-face = {U+1F600}
> frowning-face = {U+2639}
> crying-face = {U+1F622}
>
> NEW:
>
> 2.  The reaction content-disposition
>
>   A message sent as a reply MAY include a part containing a
>   content-disposition field with the value "reaction". If such a field
>   is specified the content-type of the part MUST be:
>
>     Content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
>   The content of this part is restricted to single line of emoji:
>
>   part-content = emoji *(lwsp emoji) CRLF
>
>   emoji = emoji_sequence
>   emoji_sequence = { defined in [Emoji-Seq] }
>
> DELETE:
>
>   Fully interoperable email uses 7-bit ASCII, although some email
>   handling paths directly support 8-bit data.  Emoji characters are
>   drawn from the space outside of 7-bit ASCII.  For email handling
>   paths that are 8-bit clean, the an emoji character does not need
>   special encoding.  If the path from author to recipients is not known
>   to be 8-bit clean, The emoji character SHOULD be encoded using
>   [MIME-Enc].
>
> (I don't think an explanation of body part encoding is necessary or
> useful.)
>
> OLD:
>
>   For recipient MUAs that do not support this mechanism, the header
>   field might not be displayed to the recipient.  To ensure that the
>   reaction is presented to the recipient, the responding MUA MAY
>   automatically include a second copy of the header field in the
>   message body.  This might be as the first line of the body or as the
>   first mime-part.  [MIME] By making the text be the full header field,
>   it also allows MUAs that do support the mechanism to identify this
>   redundant information and possibly remove it from display.
>
> NEW:
>
>   Recipient MUAs that support this mechanism operate as follows:
>
>   (0) If an In-Reply-To field is present check to see if it references
>       a previous message the MUA has received. 
>
>   (1) If a reference to an existing message is found check for a part with
>       a "reaction" content-disposition at either the outermost level or as
>       part of a multipart at the outermost level.
>
>   (2) If such a part is found, and the content of the part conforms to the
>       restrictions outlined above, remove the part from the message and
>       process it as a reaction. (The exact details of reaction processing are
>       necessarily MUA-specific and beyond the scope of this specification.)
>
>   (3) Processing terminates if no parts remain in the message. (Again, the
>       handling of a message that has been successfully processed is
>       MUA-specific and beyond the scope of this specification.) If parts
>       remain process the remaining message content as a reply.
>
> OLD:
>
> 4.  Security Considerations
>
>   This specification defines a distinct location for specialized
>   message content.  Processing that handles the content differently
>   from content in the message body might introduce vulnerabilities.
>   However the mere definition or use of this mechanism does not create
>   new vulnerabilities.
>
> NEW:
>
> 4.  Security Considerations
>
>   This specification employs message content that is a strict subset
>   of existing content, and thus introduces no new content-specific
>   security considerations.
>
>   This specification defines a distinct label for specialized
>   message content.  Processing that handles the content differently
>   from other content in the message body might introduce vulnerabilities.
>
> OLD:
>
> 5.  IANA Considerations
>
>   Add to "Permanent Message Header Field Registry":
>
>      Header field name:    In-Reply-React
>
>      Applicable protocol:    Mail (RFC 2822)
>
>      Status:     Experimental
>
>      Author/Change controller:    IETF
>
>      Specification document(s):   This specification.
>
>      Related information:    None
>
> NEW:
>
> 5.  IANA Considerations
>
> New Content-Disposition Parameter Registrations
>
>   This document specifies a new "reaction" content disposition and its
>   handling that should be added to the IANA registry.
>
> TBD:
>
> In order for different clients to interoperate in their handling of
> reactions, regardless of the mechanism used this document should
> probably include a specification of how to store reactions using
> IMAP annotations.
>
> I think that's more than enough for now.
>
>                                Ned
>
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