Re:Email will last forever
by deathanatos on Thursday September 04, 2014 @02:24AM
(#8267009)
> To me that is a good example of how email is flexible, and also simple.
I fail to see how a complex encoding is "simple". (Maybe I should mention that there are complex rules about where that encoding can appear, and there's two variants of it)
> It's flexible because it could support non-ascii text strings, without changing a thing.
No, clients had to be upgraded to support it.
> It's simple because the protocol doesn't care what the subject says. It only cares that it's an ASCII string.
Well, sure; why would the protocol care about it? But at some point you're encoding the email for delivery (say, you're a web service) or you're an email client trying to display it. At that point, its a deceptively simple not-ASCII string.
> but that doesn't take anything away from email's simplicity
I'm arguing that you have a twisted definition of "simple".
I fail to see how a complex encoding is "simple". (Maybe I should mention that there are complex rules about where that encoding can appear, and there's two variants of it)
> It's flexible because it could support non-ascii text strings, without changing a thing.
No, clients had to be upgraded to support it.
> It's simple because the protocol doesn't care what the subject says. It only cares that it's an ASCII string.
Well, sure; why would the protocol care about it? But at some point you're encoding the email for delivery (say, you're a web service) or you're an email client trying to display it. At that point, its a deceptively simple not-ASCII string.
> but that doesn't take anything away from email's simplicity
I'm arguing that you have a twisted definition of "simple".