XHTML, Email, Data Objects and Metadata

HTML for E-mail Community Group,




Greetings.  In addition to agreeing that e-mail would be enhanced by mathematical and scientific notations, as discussed in Math in Email (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-htmail/2014Feb/0033.html), I would like to recommend XHTML, instead of HTML, for e-mail.  XHTML is extensible, includes expressiveness for data objects, microformats and RDFa, facilitating features.




Scenarios and use cases include, in addition to mailing lists, mailing lists as interoperable with websites and content management systems such as Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress.  Scenarios include mailing list software and various collaborative software which can be utilized by groups, web-based software.  Scenarios include new features possible for discussion groups, discussion group websites and NNTP websites.


Topics include XHTML message metadata, categories and tags for threads, subthreads and emails and the indexing, search and retrieval of threads, subthreads, e-mails and data objects in e-mails (microformats and RDFa).




Topics include e-mail header fields which can indicate to mailing list recipients and their message authoring software which features, schema and vocabularies are supported by mailing list software for e-mail message authoring software to provide users with user interface components.


On the topics of scholarly and scientific communication, examples include: conference and event notifications and calls for papers which include multiple interrelated events which can be utilized on groups’ websites’ calendars and the calendars of users, and, with an XML or microformats citations and bibliography system, and/or with hyperlinks, the materials cited in and linked to in discussions could be organized onto mailing lists’ websites.




On the topics of hyperlinks and bibliographic metadata, and in mailing lists and group websites, HTTP verbs and metadata vocabulary, ontology, as well as HTTP server extensions utilizing desktop search or features in .htaccess files, could facilitate the retrieval of metadata from URL’s.  Software could utilize HTTP to obtain the metadata for organizing and rendering bibliographic references to items or tabular data from hyperlinks’ URL’s.









Kind regards,




Adam Sobieski