scr avoiding quotation flamewars

[matt jones <jonah@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey gang.

Just thought I'd pontificate onlist for a bit. Kick me into touch if it
pisses you off.

I've just waded through the lengthy and acrimonious quotation flamage on
That.pm. Good grief. Lots of suggestions were made as to how to "fix" the
"problem" of unusual or personally irritating quotation techniques from
"just deal with it" to "write a script". It got me thinking. 

BTW, davorg++ # nipping it in the bud.

I mean. Surely writing a script to munge incoming emails is approaching
the problem (if it *is* a problem) from the wrong angle? Isn't this a case
where separation of content and presentation would be the best way to go
about it?

Okay, okay, I realise that the way email works isn't b0rken[0], and that
it's established now, and this is all pointless musing, but I thought I'd
just chuck this idea at the list in the hope of getting some traffic
going[1].

What about an email format which contains metadata about the content, but
no set presentation? The mail client could then display this in the way
the recipient preferred, jeopardy-quoted, interleaved or whatever. Voila!
No more pompous and self-important tracts on The Way You Should Format
Email.

Jones, you're a dickhead. What a stupid idea. For a start, it'd
introduce loads of extra cruft around the content and waste stacks of
bandwidth. Why do you think we hate HTML mail so much? And it's a bit of a
big task to do just to keep people from getting annoyed about quoting,
don't you think?

But say you were going to do it, how would you go about it? I'm rather too
timid to make any suggestions here myself since I'm aware that my sk177z
are rather s4n3 compared to the rest of you, but I'm very interested
to hear what you lot have to say about this for the same reason. So go on,
chew on that, people, how about answers to the following:

1) Is it in any way, shape or form a good idea?
2) Okay, why not?
3) Is this reinventing something?
4) How would you do it, presuming you would?
5) Bonus points for comedy ways NOT to do it.

There, I managed the whole mail without mentioning XML. 

Awwww, shit.

-- 
mjx
"We need to win livers and minds"
[0] Is it ... ?
[1] Since I like the idea of an on-topic tech musings list.