>Personally, as someone who quite often reads mail with 'vi /var/mail/mark',
>I find HTML a real pain in the ass. The only benefit I can see is that it
>can include links to other sites, but cut and paste takes far less time
>than Netscape spends displaying complex HTML messages.
>
It looks like many of such problems would be resolved if you had a smarter
mail server. You could just tell it what type of client you use, and it
would filter out HTML code, or do any other conversion.
Modems can do such things already, they can talk down to older modems with
simple protocols, when it's needed, but when they figure out they talk to
a peer, they use different protocols and more complex features.
That's called "feature negotiation". There can also be negotiation of
content, presentation, etc. I am sure it will be done in due time, there
is enough commercial pressure there - would go much faster and smoother if
driven by clear vision, but it will be done anyway. Older standards get
extended, than put on the side, then abandoned. This has happened in
all communication media.
As for markup, I would eventually like to see not just presentation
markup, but semantic marks and comments that can be used to aid translation
of the text or communicated with intelligent user clients.
We'll have a lot more code to filter out.
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Alexander Chislenko <http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html>
<sasha1@netcom.com> <sasha@lucifer.com> <sasha@media.mit.edu>
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