ietf-822
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Re: applicability of Rich Text Format for e-mail

1991-06-05 06:59:28
Excerpts from internet.ietf-822: 4-Jun-91 re: applicability of Rich T..
Mark Crispin(_at_)cac(_dot_)washing (1030)

So, I'll confess that my support of RTF is based on:
 . it's standard
 . it seems to have what's needed
 . I won't get hate mail for using it.

Someone here at Bellcore recently said to me, "The nice thing about
standards is that there are so many to choose from!"  

I still believe that the only plausible path for getting from the mostly
text-only mail world of today to a truly multimedia mail world is
flexibility in accomodating multiple formats.  That's why I've been
pushing the "mailcap" idea -- it is a good way to make your mail reader
flexible to handle a growing set of formats.  Thus, I have absolutely no
objection to RTF, SGML, ODA, or any other format, and I'd love to see
ANY of them win and become the lingua franca for email.  Given your user
community, Mark, it seems to me that if I were you I would try to
support a "content-type: text-plus/compressed-rtf-tar" or something like
that, because that's one of the major players in your environment.   But
I'd also keep an eye open to the wider net, and support something like
"text-plus/richmail" if it seems to be picking up steam.

Having said that, however, I also recognize that there's a huge startup
cost, in many environments, to supporting the richest formats.  The idea
of richmail is to have a less powerful but still useful format that has
very low startup cost.  Which leads me to:

Excerpts from internet.ietf-822: 5-Jun-91 Re: applicability of Rich T..
Keith Moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu (1849)

I suppose one could also accomplish this with a very minimal subset of RTF,
containing about the same stuff as exists in richmail.  Using {\i foo}
is almost
as readable as %italic(foo).  That would allow RTF readers to display or print
such body parts, but not necessarily to generate them.  Serious
question: Is this
a useful feature?

Hugely.  This is one area where I think I can speak with real authority,
based on our experience with the Andrew project.   Go to Carnegie Mellon
or one of the few other sites where Andrew use is really widespread and
you will find that multiple fonts, etc. in email are used all the time. 
Absolutely critical to that use, I believe, is the fact that people have
confidence that nobody will see "formatting garbage".  You can verify
that by going to sites such as Bellcore, where a few Andrew users live
in a sea of non-Andrew users and generally feel very inhibited about
sending Andrew-format mail.   Unless I'm confident that you won't see
garbage, I'm not going to feel free to use fonts -- this is simply
because if I send you such garbage, you will inevitably complain. 
(Well, most people will, maybe you're more tolerant than the norm.)  So
giving some people the ability to display but not compose such messages
is indeed useful, because it allows the community of people who CAN
compose such messages to develop the confidence that it is socially
acceptable to do so.