Re: list of user-visible goals

On 5-feb-04, at 22:19, Keith Moore wrote:

>> Suppose we're both at an IETF meeting or such, and you want to email 
>> me
>> the latest list of goals, which is now 25 MB. If your setup is 
>> anything
>> like mine, the message will first travel back to a place close to your
>> office, then to mine and finally back to whereever the meeting is 
>> held.
>> This is enough of an inconvenience to create some special case logic
>> that makes it possible for the file, if not the rest of the message, 
>> to
>> be delivered from your computer to mine directly.

> Because we as users experience the transfer as too slow or unreliable?

Slower, less reliable, uses unnecessary bandwidth.

>> I think it would be useful to sharpen our thinking to work (for at
>> least a while) under the assumption that with mailng everything that 
>> is
>> done with SMTP, POP, IMAP and HTTP is now done using a single 
>> protocol,
>> so there is no artificial dichotomoy between servers and clients.

> a) I don't know how to translate that into a user goal

It doesn't.

> b) actually I'm inclined to think we need more specialization rather
> than less specialization.

That could very well be. But we should base this decision on 
engineering tradeoffs and not limit ourselves to replacing one of the 
protocols that play a part in email at a time.