Re: rough sketch of a potential solution

At 08:55 03/11/17 -0500, Keith Moore wrote:

>>>I don't know that problem3 is a real problem.  Do users really care what
>>>the on-the-wire encoding looks like?  If so, why?
>>
>>The absolutely final, non-expert end-user doesn't care
>>(as long as the MUA does the right job, which to some
>>extent is dependent on how convoluted the encoding is).
>>But as soon as somebody wants to do anything like a perl
>>script working on their mails, a procmail script, or anything
>>in that direction, or even just use 'more' or 'less' to peek into
>>their mail folders, it starts to matter big time.
>
>for better or worse we departed from that direction a long time ago.
>for that matter, so has the most widely used operating system, which 
>really doesn't acknowledge anymore that there is such a thing as plain text.

 From the viewpoint of email formats, we may have departed from that
direction, but it wouldn't hurt at all if we could get back again.

 From the viewpoint of operating system popularity, this is not
really an argument, because as I explained, the final end user
(the typical Windows user) doesn't care. But there are lots of
people who write all kinds of software and scripts, or even just
as system administrators have a look at the raw mails, and they
very much care about a reasonable textual format, and we should
make sure we care about them.

Regards,    Martin.