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Comment by foobarbazetc | Hacker News Reader

How about we get rid of all the MIME/XML stuff and just represent emails as JSON objects?

The end.

Multipart MIME is fairly clever in that it provides a reasonably human-readable fallback for old clients that don't support it. I'd be very wary of throwing that out. One of the benefits of plain-text email is its universality.

The only way I can see that working out would be if MTAs and MUAs negotiated during handshaking to decide on what message format they preferred, and then the MTA translated the message either to traditional RFC 2822 or some other preferred format, which could be JSON or pure XML or whatever.

...in UTF8.

Of course. As far as I'm concerned, you'd need a very good reason not to use UTF-8.

There are severe issues disassociating files from their native character set when you start dealing with east asian languages and the large amount of existing systems that you are dealing with. Forcing everyone in the world to use UTF-8 is not a legitimate option: it's great if you don't already have something more powerful (like MIME), but it should not dismantle existing known/working setups.

You could fairly easily add conneg (yuk) or an alternate json representation to the atom feed... Given that the headers are name value pairs it shouldnt be too hard to standardize.

If we get rid of MIME, won't we have gotten rid of HTTP?

JSON is a MIME type.

Obnoxious, cryptic, and incommunicado?

application/json

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