subject line -- to hide or not to hide

Alan Shutko ats@acm.org
08 Feb 2000 14:48:16 -0500


sungod <sungod@atdot.org> writes:


> Once again, this is all purely hypothetical and even a bit
> oversimplified, but selecting which parts of email documents get
> treated which ways by which mail agents seems to be a task that the
> flexible, hierarchical Extensible Markup Language would excel at.
I see only one functional benefit you would get over using MIME, signing and encrypting headers in a natural way. Other than that, everything you mentioned can be done _now_. It's just done in a more verbose way. So, what else would you gain from this? You'd suddenly need to add an XML parser to every program which touched email. And I don't know how many OSes come with an XML parsing library, so you'd end up having multiple ones being installed and in memory on any given computer. Sounds like a terrible cost if you aren't going to get much out of it. -- Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> - In a variety of flavors! Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.