Re: New Internet Draft: draft-duerst-archived-at-03.txt

> I'm trying to get the W3C list archives available in message/rfc822.
> I hope you'll contribute to making our common vision a reality,
> e.g. by working on a mailer so that it accepts message/rfc822
> messages (via the 'open this file' 'protocol' of the OS) or can
> download them directly.

A couple of things I neglected to include in the last message I sent:

First, and most importantly: I'm very appreciative of your efforts to 
make this proposal something that is broadly applicable, and also of 
your efforts to make W3C archives available in message/rfc822 format.

Second: My impression is that there's a deeper issue under the surface 
here - one which I'm still trying to understand.  I do think that "the 
web" has mostly avoided this problem by having the implicit assumption 
that nearly everything linked to will be more-or-less HTML (by 
more-or-less, I mean that it's either HTML or easily converted to HTML 
without significant loss of information content or semantics).  And now 
that I think about it, that assumption seems to be less true even for 
"the web" than it used to be.  There's more PDF, Flash, WM*, Real*, 
QuickTime, and PowerPoint than there used to be.  And even when the 
content is HTML, it's less and less often "pure" HTML and more and more 
often combined with Java, JavaScript, ActiveX, Flash, or some other 
language that is used in a way that makes it essential to the content.  
I often find myself getting annoyed because I waited for some link to 
download only to find that it isn't usable in my browser.  So I don't 
think this is just an email problem, and maybe it shouldn't be treated 
as one.  It just happens that the issue comes up in the context of 
archives of email that are converted to HTML, because that's one of 
those cases where such conversion results in significant loss of 
information and semantic content.  If I'm right, then we really should 
have the same kinds of "metadata caching" in <A ...>, <IMG...>, 
<SCRIPT..> and other HTML tags in addition to Archived-At email header 
fields.  But I know this isn't the first time this has come up in 
discussion - so maybe there's some collected wisdom about it somewhere?

Keith