Will the music labels one day offer free portable music players?  Agree to a two-year subscription to their music download service, and then you get player for free.  That way, they could control the technology that goes into the player.

I am not saying I think this is a good idea.

9:29:38 AM   

I just composed an email using Microsoft Outlook 2000, using Microsoft Word as the editor.  I wanted to see what the HTML looks like that Outlook produces.  The conclusion: the HTML is really bad.  If it's rendered, it's fine.  But it's impossible to read as plain text because of the amount of line noise (read: HTML "markup").  Microsoft Word documents converted to HTML contain a lot of non-standard markup -- probably more non-standard markup than either content or standard markup.

Where is email headed?  We seem to have dumped text/enriched [RFC 1896].  Text/enriched could not compete with text/html.  One might think that text/html will eventually become "standard", in some sense.  However, with the possibility of people getting their email on small handheld devices, I am not so sure that HTML email is a good idea.  If the HTML in an email is HTML as it's used on the web, then it might not be practical to render the HTML on a small display.

What is needed is a compromise: just a subset of HTML.  Let's keep the p, br, hr, u, b, i, a, big, small, and font tags (for the sake of color).  Let's also keep the tags used for lists: ul, ol, li, dl, dt, dd.  Let's drop the table (and related tags), form (and related tags), head, title, and others.

Some of the tags I would like to see used in email are not in HTML 4.0 (u, big, small, font).  These tags are useful in email.  Email messages are written quickly -- very little thought is given to the structure of a message's content.  For the immediate decisions that one makes when composing and email -- "I want this text bigger" -- these tags make good sense.

Is XHTML going to offer this compromise?  XHTML is supposed to be modular.  Maybe there can be a profile that is recommended for email.

9:11:38 AM