Nathaniel writes:
I guess I had been thinking of richmail's lack of syntactic conformance
to anything else as a virtue rather than a problem, because it avoids
religious wars such as ODA vs. SGML vs. RTF vs. whatever. That is, if a
rich mail format is syntactically compatible with one of the above,
doesn't promoting its use imply a preference for the one it conforms
with? One of my goals with richmail was to make "richer" text
available *without* having to get involved in those wars...
But adding yet another markup language to the babel of existing ones
certainly enlivens the debate. The _idea_ of richmail is very seductive.
When I first read it in the RFC, it sounded very plausible. But the more I
think about it the more suspicious of it I become.
The 38-line filter to rip out richmail syntax is really a strawman. As a
composer I don't want to type "%underline(idea" and discover after the
message has been delivered that I've underlined the rest of my message. So
any implementor worth his Kernigan/Ritchie wouldn't want to inflict this
sort of embarrassment on his faithful users. As a result, a UA
implementing richmail in all likelihood is going to have a document
compiler written into it. I don't know how much effort this requires, but
I doubt it could be written in 38 lines. It's not at all clear to me that
implementors are going to jump at the chance to include richmail in their
UA --- it's not going to be first on my list :-).
Heck. Let's leave it in. It certainly does no harm. But I'm rather
doubtful of its success (Sorry, Nathaniel).
-jwn2
[Writing from home with serial Eudora]