Re: XHTML, Email, Data Objects and Metadata

Am 12.02.14 19:57, schrieb Joshua Cranmer:
> On 2/12/2014 9:16 AM, Adam wrote:
>> 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.
>
> It's not clear to me that XHTML can do anything that HTML can't do, at 
> least under HTML5.
>> 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.
>
> Most of this is thinking the wrong way. The HTML of a message is the 
> body of the message, which is a comparatively expensive thing to 
> process. In many cases, an email client won't process a body until it 
> is displayed, so any metadata that is valuable before then (in, say, a 
> message list pane) shouldn't go in the body.


Some mail tooling providers already ask for putting metadata into the 
body, see https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions/getting-started

- Felix

> This explains, for example, why the header-wrapping features of S/MIME 
> 3.0 have seen little to no uptake.
>
> There are two places to put true metadata in a message: either the 
> headers or as an attachment with a well-known MIME type. 


> Invitations are processed as text/calendar, for example, and that 
> works across email clients. Threading is indicated by In-Reply-To, 
> Message-ID, and References headers, and there is a large set of 
> mailing list metadata in headers--from the headers of this message 
> alone, I can tell you how to post to the mailing list, unsubscribe, 
> identify which mailing list it was sent to, and even tell you where 
> the mailing list message is archived.
> -- 
> Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. -- Donald E. Knuth