subject line -- to hide or not to hide

[Alan Shutko]

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.