To play devil's advocate, why is email shit? It is pretty much a way to send someone a document in the original way Berners Lee defined html which was essentially sgml. I get not letting people mail active scripts, but every large mail provider also makes a browser.
So email is shitty because providers fuck with it at the mailserver level (i think this is the case, and have heard that about providers) as it doesn't seem to be a problem at the view level.
So this is sort of the issue. We couldn't get consensus on this early on, so no one was able to force standardization, now only a few players have the ability to define standards but they all own large scale messaging channels outside of email.
edit: meant to say that browsers obviously view html and css3 is pretty good as well. We could probably standardize this enough to allow people to write emails in this format and embed imagery. We would not allow JS for obvious reasons, but sending cool emails would be fun and we could also add new features. I mean, the web has developed somewhat shittily, but adding a few new features outside of like the 16 original tags would be cool. Not sure what percentage of tags and attributes actually work, but then again, no one is...
What does that mean? A mail server can be a small perl script running on an embedded computer, or it can be a hundred front-end SMTP servers using a database as a back end datastore, there's no real infrastructure limit other than being able to make and receive connections on TCP port 25.
So email is shitty because providers fuck with it at the mailserver level (i think this is the case, and have heard that about providers) as it doesn't seem to be a problem at the view level.
So this is sort of the issue. We couldn't get consensus on this early on, so no one was able to force standardization, now only a few players have the ability to define standards but they all own large scale messaging channels outside of email.
edit: meant to say that browsers obviously view html and css3 is pretty good as well. We could probably standardize this enough to allow people to write emails in this format and embed imagery. We would not allow JS for obvious reasons, but sending cool emails would be fun and we could also add new features. I mean, the web has developed somewhat shittily, but adding a few new features outside of like the 16 original tags would be cool. Not sure what percentage of tags and attributes actually work, but then again, no one is...