Email should be plain text. HTML in email itself was a terrible idea, though not as bad as AMP in email.

Some HTML in email is fine, I would say the subset that can be expressed by markdown. Making text bold, italic etc should be possible. The real problem I have is how limited email HTML/CSS and email clients are compared to the web, so that every "rich" email will use table layouts that render terribly on mobile.

But still better than anything else that could reasonably be achieved.

Tables are pretty much the only cross-platform/client way to format email.

> Email should be plain text.

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.

There's been rich-text email since (at least) 1980 and by the mid- to late-1980s there were many competing efforts: CMU's AMS, BBN's Diamond/Slate, NeXT's NeXTMail, and probably several others.

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.

Technically email is plaintext, though for the definition you aspire towards, it was in the early days. But then various RFC's added this and that and now email processing/sanitisation is scary.

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.

Pure gold pun right here:

> 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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKjtZy87iI0

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKjtZy87iI0

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.

> Email is not part of the web

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

so, not emails? I can't refer to an email via URI, as far as I know.

Wait, the original claim was:

> 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.

That’s good news for books ("urn:isbn:"), movies ("urn:isan:"), UUIDs ("urn:uuid:"), and so many other things that I thought weren’t on the web.

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?

I'm guessing the point you're driving at is "these things obviously aren't on the web, so this is wrong"?

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.

If the definition of the web is "anything addressable via URI," then the definition of the web is no longer useful. I can imagine a URN scheme for every atom in the universe. Welcome to the web -- you're soaking in it!

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.)

Every email message has a unique identifier called the Message-Id, but SMTP does not host messages with an HTTP URI.

Serving public URIs for messages must be done by separate web servers like a webmail client, or a mail archiving tool such as Pipermail.

> an HTTP URI

Note that there's no requirement for something to be an HTTP URI specifically. Any URI will do.

Yet still, without a webmail client (a client that specifically takes an offline protocol and puts it on the “web”) email would not have a URI. You an “link” to a mailbox, but not create a particular mail with a particular identifier then later retrieve it with that same URI. The URI identifies the users mailbox, NOT their mail.

Good point, there are URIs for other protocols (like FTP, Gopher etc).

> An information object is "on the web" if it has a URI.

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".

> I think that TBL is very incorrect here.

You think Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World-Wide Web, is very incorrect about what makes up the World-Wide Web?

Yes, he is not the authority on the web and has very little to do with it these days other than accepting back slaps for something he did decades ago.

Yes, I do. Even TBL can't take all of the services that ran on the internet before the web was a thing and declare that they're all "the web" now.

> Email is not part of the web

Content-Type: text/html seems to disagree with your assertion.

The HTML documentation sitting in my /usr/share/doc does not make it part of the web.

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.