Re: HTML for email

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 3/2/21 1:28 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:

>
> What Google needed for their immediate commercial needs was a simple 
> archive technology that zips up a few Web page components delivered 
> over HTTP/TLS. So they wrote a very narrow spec that only addressed 
> their use case and then came to IETF to get it blessed as a niche 
> solution. But it is a solution that was designed with absolutely no 
> thought to the wider problem. They didn't want to consider the wider 
> problem at all.

That kind of tension between different ideas of how to scope an effort 
always exists.   I agree that IETF often scopes its WGs too narrowly, 
sometimes in a deliberate effort to create an artificial sense of 
consensus.   And by doing so, it often fails to resolve tussles that 
could have probably been resolved.   But sometimes you simply can't get 
enough of the different concerns to cooperate to address a common 
problem.   And you can fail by scoping an effort too widely at least as 
easily as you can fail by scoping an effort too narrowly.   It's a 
judgment call, and sometimes those judgments will be better than others.

Keith