Re: Email (was Re: Next steps towards a net zero IETF)

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

I agree with the sentiments but not the conclusions here.

Yes, HTML in email is a dog's breakfast. And whose fault is that? Who is
responsible for email messaging standards? Well SMTP is IETF and HTML is
W3C and HTML for email was allowed to fall through the cracks.

The structural problem here is that the HTML that is appropriate for email
is HTML/2.0 which is structured markup. HTML ceased being that when
HTML/3.0 landed and it lacks the features required for email messaging
which include the ability to mark sections of text as quoted. The handling
of fonts etc. is idiosyncratic at best. But whose responsibility is that?

Yes, Github does have some features that can be used to support
collaboration. But it is a collaboration flow engine wrapped around a
source code management system and it is really not built for what we need
for our work. So while it has some advantages, you have to be using Github **in
a collaborative setting** pretty much every day to remember how it all
works. The notion of forking a repository so I can submit a pull request in
order to comment on something is obscurantism at best.

I do use git every hour of every day but only because I wrote some shell
scripts several years ago and they run via crontabs to make sure my work is
safe if the house burns down. I could not tell anyone what any of the
commands are without looking at a manual. There was a day when I could
write 6502 assembler code from memory in my head, those days are gone and
so is my memory of git's stupid command structure. Expecting me to be
familiar with git because I use it is unreasonable.


So what do we do instead? Well, there is a reason I have been building a
security platform for the past five years, the end goal is to support this:

Mathematical Mesh 3.0 Part X: Everything (ietf.org)
<https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-hallambaker-everything-00.html>

Why does an instant message have to have a different format to a post to a
chat forum or a microblogging site?

Why isn't an email message, a blog post or an article just a superset of
the paragraph post format?

Why isn't a book or a report just a superset of the message format?

We could bikeshed ETML endlessly but the core concept there is that ETML is
one markup that only describes document structure which comes in three
different levels with Level 1 being directed at chat, Level 2 articles,
Level 3 reports.


Everything in my world is end to end encrypted. To start a discussion,
Alice loads up a document to the server, it is of course encrypted. Then
Alice decides who she wants on her team. She adds Bob and Carol to the
review team and they get decryption access through Mesh Threshold secret
sharing. Since this is a classified project, there is also a global
encryption key contribution that is shared separately via Kyber.

Bob reads the document, he notices some spelling issues and adds
annotations on his copy. He also notices some broader issues that affect
multiple parts of the document. All these annotations are tagged with the
appropriate lightweight semantic and appends to the DARE sequence
accompanying the document.

Carol edits the document to correct the spelling errors, Alice opens up a
separate document to discuss some of the issues, etc. etc. One of the
issues is legal and so Doug, the external counsel is brought into the loop.


OK so why don't we use tools like this? A large part of the reason is the
lack of the necessary security infrastructure to make it secure. But
another part is the lack of open interoperable standards. For this sort of
system to work, Doug has to be able to plug into this conversation and get
the information he needs using a tool that he already has on his machine,
it cant be a proprietary thing he has to buy and install just for one
client.

If someone wants to bend the ears of some VC folk, we could build this for
real for less than 8 figures. If not, I have other plans which will get
there eventually.


PHB