On 10/18/2010 11:01 AM, Wietse Venema wrote:
Does DKIM control text-to-voice conversion,
...
Obviously these two are among the more lossy transformations. But
even text-to-screen conversion,
...
Folks,
This is all slightly surreal.
There is a premise that is motivating the proponents of giving instructions to
MUA designers about DKIM outcomes. The premise is that providing DKIM
information will be useful, and possibly that providing /more/ DKIM information
will be more useful. (There is also some unfortunate vagueness about the
actual
meaning of some of this information.)
This has nothing to do with layer violations, architectural purity or even the
intractability of gaining change to MUAs. It has to do with the cognitive
models employed for MUA design.
The premise is wrong.
Or rather, the premise is naive and probably wrong.
The premise is based on a model of typical users that has nothing to do with
/actual/ typical users.
Folks making assertions about what MUAs should do need to gain some background
in UXE and usability design, starting with cognitive models for UIs. They
should pay particular attention to the repeated observation that users
understand little of what they see from the system and care about understanding
it little. (This observation is not specific to MUAs or even computer
interface
design. The design of control environments often is more a task of /reducing/
information than of increasing it, due to limitations of human processing,
especially in real time.)
This working group can, at best, recite a list of information that is available
to MUAs. The instant this group starts to make normative statements about the
use of that information, it is entering into territory about which it lacks
sufficient expertise.
Moving from the slightly cautious "probably wrong" above, I'll revert to the
sentence before it, concerning the idea that marking validated versus
invalidated information will somehow be useful for typical users." It's simply
and plainly wrong.
As a small example of how peculiar the current line of advocacy is, I'll
suggest
a simple example:
Alice sends Bob a message.
Alice diligently signs all the right header fields and all of the body.
Bob's MUA is sophisticated and up to date, so it displays the message with
this extra information about the "validity" of the message.
What is the actual value of this marking, given that Alice is really a
spammer?
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
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