Re: Stupid Ideas

Nelson Minar (nelson@media.mit.edu)
Fri, 14 Aug 1998 16:13:55 -0400


>I seem to recall some group working in HTML definitions whose goal was
>to eliminate '>' reply tags from email. Any information on this group?
>Is it time to rethink email content?

This sounds like rather a narrow focus. And isn't <blockquote> still
in HTML? Anyway, I despair that we'll ever get rid of line oriented
email. It's really a shame, but it's just too hard to smoothly
upgrade. Who here actually likes getting MIME email? Who here hasn't
sent a flame to some Netscape weenie whose email is 3 times as big as
it should be? Anyone remember NeXTMail? I should include a uuencoded
copy of this email in richtext just for nostalgia's sake.

I know we have 80 column lines because punchcards were 80 columns. But
why were punchcards that size?

>I understand, xterms will soon support HTML anyways.

God, I hope you're kidding.

While we're on this rant - what is *up* with VT100? What a horrible
dog's breakfast of terminal control. Hasn't anyone ever defined a
really nice, clean, simple set of escape codes for screen control?
Abstractions like curses and termcap and terminfo and slang just make
it worse.

stupid ideas? Got a million of them, right here on my "modern" OS.