Oooh, I shudder to get involved in this debate, but Nathaniel's last
point just brings back too many bad memories.
An extremely simple syntax is a virtue in the *first* release. However,
as time ticks on, and assuming richmail succeeds, people will start wanting
to enhance it. Richmail, as such, does not have a very easy way to
extend itself. It is designed around a very simple design target. Indeed,
this is its greatest virtue.
However, as richmail grows it will start resembling other text encoding
standards. And then we might regret not "paying the price" at the start
by using some other, externally defined and already existing standard.
(But to be fair: if we don't pick a simple enough subset of a standard then
richmail may be stillborn because it is too big).
Neil
----- Begin Included Message -----
Date: Mon, 10 Jun 1991 18:35:38 -0400 (EDT)
From: Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb(_at_)thumper(_dot_)bellcore(_dot_)com>
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...
----- End Included Message -----