Re: identified focus areas

Topics that I think may be relevant to discuss for HTML email are:
* The role of JavaScript, SVG, MathML, and CSS in email, all connected 
but distinct from HTML
* Discussing the interaction of HTML with multipart/related. I don't 
think there's a clear way to enumerate, for example, all the places 
where URLs may exist in HTML/SVG/MathML/CSS and thus need to be changed 
to/from cid: links.
* Interaction of <meta charset> and the Content-Type charset declaration.
* Security threats in HTML email. I know some people are uncomfortable 
with showing remote content in email as a potential tracking mechanism, 
and JS (if permitted) needs stringent security checks to avoid leaking 
information. The role of audio and video are also up for debate.
* Some sort of provisional standard or agreement on semantic HTML for 
common email options, like quoting messages, representing headers of 
forwarded/quoted emails.

A concern I do have is that email is dominated by a small oligarchy of 
major clients (e.g., Outlook) and webmail users (Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail) 
while retaining an extremely long tail of actively-used email clients. 
Without clear buy-in from the large clients, it's not clear to me that 
the resulting documents would be useful or relevant in the long run.

Disclaimer: I am a long-time contributor and maintainer of Mozilla 
Thunderbird. However, I do not claim to speak for all of the Thunderbird 
developers or users (or, indeed, anyone but myself).

-- 
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. -- Donald E. Knuth

Received on Thursday, 30 January 2014 17:55:04 UTC