Excerpts from internet.ietf-822: 8-Feb-92 Re: Richtext Erik
Naggum(_at_)naggum(_dot_)no (3405)
The last thing we need is RFC authors with political motives they won't
even disclose.
Calm down, Erik. I think I've been very up-front with my political
agenda: I want a richtext format as part of the standard, and I want it
so badly that I don't care very much about the details of that format,
because I think those details are dwarfed in importance by the overall
goal of having such a facility. For me, that makes richtext an almost
entirely political enterprise. It also has, I believe, a few very
strong implications:
1. Richtext can't be ANY existing format, because that will open up the
"word processor wars" and someone will perceive his ox as being gored.
To put it more prosaically: whatever the flaws in richtext, they will
screw everybody equally, and won't favor some corporation that is
already marketing a richtext-based product.
2. Richtext has to be extremely simple, even if this means a loss of
desired functionality.
My effort in promoting richtext has been entirely focused on these two
goals. In the process, I have taken LOTS of suggestions from LOTS of
people on ways to improve richtext that don't conflict with these goals.
There is no hidden agenda. The agenda is right there. We need a rich
text facility for email, and the above reasoning implies that people who
think seriously about document formats will inevitably be unhappy with
it, no matter how many times we send it back to committee.
By the way, I cited C as an example of non-nestable comments simply
because your earlier message seemed to imply that it was a totally
deranged idea. I am certainly aware of the differences between
programming and markup languages, I just didn't see them as particularly
relevant. Had you pointed out earlier that the nested comments
constituted a problem vis-a-vis SGML, I would have happily changed it.
Stay tuned for a proposal on a way out of this mess, after I catch up
with the rest of the list's mail. -- NB