Excerpts from mail: 10-Jun-91 I vote NO to Richmail Harald T.
Alvestrand(_at_)del (991)
The CCITT tried to do just about the same thing in ASN.1 with their
SFD format in the 1984 version of X.400.
It is now deader than the dodo (that is, it never came alive).
I'm not convinced by this argument. Making richmail work on top of a
large existing user base on bitmap workstations strikes me as much more
plausible than making something similar work on a system with NO
established users (X.400 in 1984) and with much less widespread
availability of appropriate hardware. This strikes me as being like
saying that since a point & click interface didn't work for Xerox in the
market place, it was stupid for Apple to try something similar...
I do agree that it might be possible to make richmail more closely
resemble an incredibly tiny subset of ODA or SGML, but I'm not clear on
what that would achieve, so I'm reluctant to do it if there are ANY
costs involved in terms of increased complexity... -- Nathaniel