I think that {Brian, Dan, Mark}'s remarks about Richmail are compelling;
We should indeed attempt to piggyback off the efforts of others (SGML
or ODA or TeX or RTF, appropriately subsetted), particularly one which
is well-defined, reasonably simple, and for which lots of converters
exist. There should be very compelling, important arguments as to why
yet another document mark-up standard is needed. And we should be wary
of overly simple solutions; there are a lot of problems to solve with
document formatting, and they're hard to get right -- one of the reasons
there are so many mark-up systems.
I have a great deal of experience with both SGML and TeX. They are both
extremely complex, extremely heavy, and very inefficient. They both involve
an enormous amount of out-of-band context -- font specifications, format
specifications, included files, and so forth. We're talking about thousands of
lines of code to even being to deal with either of them. As a result they are
both completely unsuitable replacements for Richmail.
ODA is completely unsuitable because it is not based on a plain text input
format. The complexity and overhead of dealing with ODA is also prohibitive.
I don't know much about RTF. I've invited advocates of this format to post
details of what it looks like. I don't want to hear that Microsoft has a book
somewhere about it (try getting information like this out of Microsoft sometime
-- it is not any fun at all). An absolute minimum is information on _what_ book
I should look at, but I really think that if the format cannot be summarized in
a posted document that alone is a sufficient reason not to consider it.
{Greg, Neil/Vincent}'s got the right idea; my choice would be to
eliminate the discussion of Richmail from the RFC-XXXX, as it seems to
muddy the waters and introduce an unnecessary point of contention, and
start a new RFC about some simple version of an existing document
standard, something like "A Simple Mark-Up Format for Internet Mail".
Then it can just be some content-type.
The problem is that everyone is objecting to Richmail on the basis that it
might be objectionable to someone else, or is objecting to it because some
other format might possibly be better. Let's cut to the chase, please, and
propose specific alternatives and specify what they are. You've proposed
TeX and SGML and ODA, and these are formats which I happen to know enough
about to form an intelligent response with no additional information. RTF
is still a possible contender -- I'm waiting to see what it really is.
I feel that Richmail is an extremely important facility to have and I don't
want to get rid of it for such non-reasons as these.
Ned