Or, based on the evidence...
... Microsoft and Yahoo think it's a good idea and want to support it. There's no particular reason email needs to sit around in the gutter while the rest of the web gets more multimedia and more performant.
... Microsoft and Yahoo think it's a good idea and want to support it. There's no particular reason email needs to sit around in the gutter while the rest of the web gets more multimedia and more performant.
I (sincerely) appreciate reminders like this of just how much online opinions and experiences vary.
My sense of the last few years of web changes is that performance is mostly a product of script-blocking or AMP-degraded functionality, and new multimedia is mostly a user-hostile attempt to boost revenue. Whether it's five-point stories broken across five page loads, Reddit's "use our app" links breaking in AMP, or Techcrunch's insane scroll-down-to-redirect-to-homepage layout, the last ~3 years of web development are full of changes I find actively negative.
I understand the fight over something like AMP for email much better when I remember how far from universal that is. It's not really a surprise there's so much disagreement over what to do next when there's this much divide over what's working well at present.
Email is not part of the web, and more multimedia and more round trips is not more performant, it's the opposite.
Content-Type: text/html seems to disagree with your assertion.
The output from man -H is not part of the web, no matter what its mime type is.
HTML is not the same as the web.
Tables are pretty much the only cross-platform/client way to format email.
But then email is one large unsanitized input that has so many rules to be applied, what could go wrong.
That's why email attachments alone are an utter MIME-field when it comes to security.
> That's why email attachments alone are an utter MIME-field when it comes to security.
And yes, remember the 35C3 talk on e2e email security.
Not seen that, watching now (about half way thru) and nice to retouch upon a feild I've not working in for many years and seeing how not much has changed. Equally a little depressing, to see the same types of problems 10 years on.
That ship sailed the moment it got named email, leading people to think of it as an electronic form of mail, and so to expect that eventually it could be used for any documents you would send by mail.
With mail, I can send anything I can print or handwrite on paper, which includes text in multiple fonts, graphics, charts, tables, in a variety of colors. I can also include anything that fits in the envelope, so I can include files on floppy or disc or memory card or a thin thumb drive.
Sure, earlier email systems could not handle anything more than plain text, but because it was called email many people assumed that was just because common computers and displays didn't have the capability to handle more.
Once the GUI became prevalent for home and office computers, rich email was inevitable.
In retrospect, if the people who designed the earlier email systems had wanted the restriction to plain text to be a design goal, rather than just a consequence of the technology of the day, they should have named it etelegram to make it clear.
I'd go so far as to argue that the parent's reaction -- "email should be plain-text" -- is exactly why the horrors of HTML are what we have today. No one adopted any of the better alternatives out there and then Netscape -- a web browser, after all -- hacked in HTML mail, and "worse is better" won the day yet again.
The web is not just what happens in a web browser:
> An information object is "on the web" if it has a URI.
— Tim Berners-Lee, Axioms of Web Architecture, https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms.html
Serving public URIs for messages must be done by separate web servers like a webmail client, or a mail archiving tool such as Pipermail.
Note that there's no requirement for something to be an HTTP URI specifically. Any URI will do.
> Email is not part of the web
That's "email", not "emails". I understood that to mean email the concept / technology, not "emails" as in individual email resources.
By that reading, yes, email is on the web. You can link to a mailbox with the mailto: URI scheme.
If you read it as "Individual emails are not on the web" instead, then webmail seems to cover that.
If I reside in "urn:oid:2.16.840" and I read "https://news.ycombinator.com", is that what they call the inner-platform effect?
The web is an abstract information space that can contain arbitrary links between objects. The web isn't something you load in a browser, it's a way of organising links between things. So, yes, you can link to books, movies, etc. Anything with a URI.
You might be interested in this early document about the World-Wide Web:
https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/1996/ppf.html
It describes what I'm saying in more detail, including explicitly mentioning books as something that can be addressed in URI space.
More seriously, I think that -- if pressed -- I'd say that the identifiers are on the web, but the things are not. Other than that, I believe we would agree???
That said, the origin of this discussion is in relation to Google's launching of AMP for e-mail. The justification was that e-mails are on the web, so it's OK to use AMP to push them forward. A better viewpoint, though one I disagree with, relates AMP to being a better mode of HTML. (As opposed to one of the Web.)
I think that TBL is very incorrect here. If that statement is accurate, then most of the non-web internet would have to be considered "the web".
You think Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World-Wide Web, is very incorrect about what makes up the World-Wide Web?
"The rest of the web" is the ad-laden, tracker-infested, bloated gutter of the internet. Email is (was?) a little morsel of the old open internet (along with RSS/podcasts) that has not yet drowned in the morass.
More performant then text? What are you comparing it to smoke signals FFS? And let me see if I understand you correctly, you _WANT_ multimedia in your emails?
What is the point? To send miniature versions of web-pages?!?
None of those "Advantages" were advantageous to the end user. This only benefits Google or other corporations, and anything that benefits them harms me.AMP in email could, hypothetically, allow me to hit the "checkin to my flight" button for a Southwest flight directly from my confirmation email without having to bump over to their website. That's cool, convenient, and simplifies my life. It also benefits the corporation (their resource allocation is easier if they have a firm count of flyers) and it benefits Google (I'm more likely to use an email client that facilitates this).
The business world is full of win-wins, and this has the potential to be one of them.
You can do that in HTML email too. Newsletter have an "unsubscribe" button, calendar invites have a yes/no/maybe button.
https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/actions/actions-o...
So now we just have to lie back and think of profits?
You’ve perfectly summed up AMP for email with a use case that’s already been solved by a simpler technology that nobody has complained about.
As their users spend more time with voice assistants and less with search result pages, Google needs to make up for those losses somewhere else. If they don’t, their revenue growth will end or invert, the stock price will drop, and the amount of money they can pay all of their employees will significantly decline.
For all of the messaging platforms Google tried to build and messed up, it is a real possiblilty that Google could end up killing Gmail through management screw ups.
I am unapologetic about blocking ads, beacons, cookies, trackers of all kinds. My computer, my rules. Just as I'm not required to look at roadside ads, and I don't, I refuse to allow my network to become compromised to give someone else another BMW. Running a website is the cost of doing business. If you cannot afford the domain name, bandwidth, etc., choose another business model. Ads were and are a horrible business model. I haven't seen an ad in literally years. I plan on keeping it this way.
There are some very smart people in the blocking arena. Since most of this stuff is delivered via JS, it's fairly trivial, at least at the moment, to handle same-domain ads. The game may change in future, but the adblock people usually prevail.
One idea I have if the sites start outright blocking blocking users, is to sort out how to write the ads to a form of /dev/null while making the site think they've been shown. I used to do this with Flash cookies/LSOs. I wrote them to /dev/null so I could take advantage of Flash back when it was a thing, yet have no LSOs on my machine to track me. Coupled with referer blocking, history blocking, no fingerprinting, and other settings, it worked a treat.
I'm willing to bet that if we cannot "block" them as part of the domain, we can sort out a way to block the element, shunt the ads into the bit bucket and continue on our merry.
I think several dns-based ad blocking programs can do this today, but so far I have not had a problem with returning NULL address (0.0.0.0). Pihole talks about the pros and cons of common approaches: https://docs.pi-hole.net/ftldns/blockingmode/. One downside is you have to run a webserver to catch the redirect and all the overhead that comes with it.
In my view, that's not "email sitting around in the gutter", that's "email retaining things that make it valuable".
Also, email is not, and should not be, the web -- so "the rest of the web" is a bit of a nonsequitor.
imap is so insane that every email provider reinvented it to have a sane api for their web client and app. Fastmail also created JMAP to have a standard json api for email.
No technology has angered me more in the last few years than AMP. I have literally switched my main search engine just so I don't have to deal with AMP.
At no point have I ever appreciated AMP. It has only been a disadvantage.
How long until the sender’s ad targeting subcontractors know you read it?
How long until they can act on that information to manipulate you into sending cash, voting to sabotage the government, or otherwise act against your own interests?
With static email, all of these latencies are in the days, or at least hours. With amp email, it can be accomplished in 100’s of milliseconds.