69 lines
2.8 KiB
Plaintext
69 lines
2.8 KiB
Plaintext
MBOX-Line: From dkonigsberg at logicprobe.org Thu May 26 19:04:25 2011
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To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
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From: Derek Konigsberg <dkonigsberg@logicprobe.org>
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Date: Fri Jun 8 12:34:46 2018
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Subject: [Imap-protocol] History question.
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In-Reply-To: <alpine.OSX.2.00.1105261724000.973@hsinghsing.panda.com>
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References: <4DDEA412.6030305@aol.com>
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<4DDEDDD6.1040507@logicprobe.org> <alpine.BSO.2.00.1105261628370.892@morgaine.smi.sendmail.com> <2CB073A1-B421-4CFB-AE30-B17005C876A0@iki.fi>
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<alpine.OSX.2.00.1105261724000.973@hsinghsing.panda.com>
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Message-ID: <4DDF06A9.2050608@logicprobe.org>
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On 05/26/2011 09:03 PM, Mark Crispin wrote:
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> On Fri, 27 May 2011, Timo Sirainen wrote:
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>> I've noticed there are many people who want web 2.0 kind of interface to
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>> emails (xml/ajax/dunno)
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>
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> Only now?
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>
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>> And why
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>> aren't they just using IMAP? Because they're scared of even trying to
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>> use it.
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>
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> To those who only know Web 2.0, solutions that don't look like Web 2.0 are
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> hostile and problematic.
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There's a saying I've seen somewhere that I love to mention in
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discussions like this:
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"Those who fail to understand network protocols are doomed to
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reimplement them over port 80"
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> I think that it's the poor CS education that most students get these days:
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> Java as a first programming language, with cookbook software development
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> using large libraries and predefined templates. I've met graduates of CS
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> programs who don't comprehend pointers and recursion!
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I'm glad that I went to college before CS programs shifted to Java.
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Sure, the majority of my post-college development work has been in Java
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(or similar languages), but I think Java makes it too easy to gloss over
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the fundamentals that you really do need to understand.
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> There's a middle ground between the Scylla of being so mathematical that
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> real-world engineering is lost, and the Charybdis of making everything be
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> the assembly of Lego blocks.
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>
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>> Hmm. IMAP over XML maybe?..
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>
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> That wasn't an earthquake you just felt. That was me shuddering in
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> horror.
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I think the most painful part of implementing an E-Mail client is
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dealing with all the legacy charsets and encodings, and the different
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ways they're encoded in what is essentially 7-bit US-ASCII. If I could
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make one change, I'd declare that all human-readable protocol text was
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UTF-8 (and preferably that anything not intended to be human readable
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was just raw bytes inside a literal block).
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It would also be nice if the IMAP grammar made more complete use of the
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parenthesized list format used by the majority of it.
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To me, the biggest advantage of XML is that it allows for a standardized
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parser/generator library that's maintained independently from the actual
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data format. (Of course the disadvantages of XML itself are probably
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obvious to everyone here.)
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--
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----------------------------
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Derek Konigsberg
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dkonigsberg@logicprobe.org
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----------------------------
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