MBOX-Line: From dkonigsberg at logicprobe.org  Thu May 26 19:04:25 2011
To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
From: Derek Konigsberg <dkonigsberg@logicprobe.org>
Date: Fri Jun  8 12:34:46 2018
Subject: [Imap-protocol] History question.
In-Reply-To: <alpine.OSX.2.00.1105261724000.973@hsinghsing.panda.com>
References: <4DDEA412.6030305@aol.com>
	<4DDEDDD6.1040507@logicprobe.org>	<alpine.BSO.2.00.1105261628370.892@morgaine.smi.sendmail.com>	<2CB073A1-B421-4CFB-AE30-B17005C876A0@iki.fi>
	<alpine.OSX.2.00.1105261724000.973@hsinghsing.panda.com>
Message-ID: <4DDF06A9.2050608@logicprobe.org>

On 05/26/2011 09:03 PM, Mark Crispin wrote:
> On Fri, 27 May 2011, Timo Sirainen wrote:
>> I've noticed there are many people who want web 2.0 kind of interface to
>> emails (xml/ajax/dunno)
>
> Only now?
>
>> And why
>> aren't they just using IMAP? Because they're scared of even trying to
>> use it.
>
> To those who only know Web 2.0, solutions that don't look like Web 2.0 are
> hostile and problematic.

There's a saying I've seen somewhere that I love to mention in 
discussions like this:
"Those who fail to understand network protocols are doomed to 
reimplement them over port 80"

> I think that it's the poor CS education that most students get these days:
> Java as a first programming language, with cookbook software development
> using large libraries and predefined templates. I've met graduates of CS
> programs who don't comprehend pointers and recursion!
I'm glad that I went to college before CS programs shifted to Java. 
Sure, the majority of my post-college development work has been in Java 
(or similar languages), but I think Java makes it too easy to gloss over 
the fundamentals that you really do need to understand.

> There's a middle ground between the Scylla of being so mathematical that
> real-world engineering is lost, and the Charybdis of making everything be
> the assembly of Lego blocks.
>
>> Hmm. IMAP over XML maybe?..
>
> That wasn't an earthquake you just felt. That was me shuddering in
> horror.
I think the most painful part of implementing an E-Mail client is 
dealing with all the legacy charsets and encodings, and the different 
ways they're encoded in what is essentially 7-bit US-ASCII.  If I could 
make one change, I'd declare that all human-readable protocol text was 
UTF-8 (and preferably that anything not intended to be human readable 
was just raw bytes inside a literal block).

It would also be nice if the IMAP grammar made more complete use of the 
parenthesized list format used by the majority of it.

To me, the biggest advantage of XML is that it allows for a standardized 
parser/generator library that's maintained independently from the actual 
data format.  (Of course the disadvantages of XML itself are probably 
obvious to everyone here.)

-- 
----------------------------
  Derek Konigsberg
  dkonigsberg@logicprobe.org
----------------------------

