XML e-mail (was: RE: security problem in emailing HTML)

On Thu, 9 Dec 1999, Bart Szyszka wrote:

> HTML in e-mail is useful if you're subscribed to a newletter like Wired.com's
> or CNet.com's.

That's not necessarily true. And anyway, these newsletters could just as
easily be sent as attachments in HTML.

I think the main problem with HTML mail is that HTML doesn't really work
with e-mail. Most e-mail messages have need for three kinds of elements:
Paragraphs, a "Quote" enclosure and a Signature. Inline elements like
emphasis or hyperlinks would be nice. When was the last time you saw someone
use the semantic equivalent of an H1 element in e-mail?

Maybe a nice, simple, clean XML DTD for e-mail would be nice. Just a few
elements: Paragraph, List (Ordered/Unordered) something like <QUOTE
FROM="Bart Szyszka" WHEN="1999-09-12T14:55:42Z-0500"></QUOTE> (I hope I got
the ISO date right, I'm doing it from memory :-)) to denote quoted text in
replies, a hyperlink anchor (also able to use fragment identifiers to link
to attachments in the message? Maybe a different syntax?). And you could
always use the HTML namespace if you wanted to add something like a table...

This would really be nice, actually. Hey... I think I'll write one up...
(I'll be back).

-- 
Stephanos Piperoglou                              <stephanos@webreference.com>
Maintainer, HTML with Style                    <http://webreference.com/html/>
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Received on Thursday, 9 December 1999 16:28:26 UTC