Mats Ohrman writes...
Just to add my little push to the direction Richmail currently seems
to be taking:
I would find some simple way to indicate the structure of a document
much more useful than some way to transmit the formatting. It's
somewhat like sending source instead of binaries. :-)
The structure may then be interpreted and formatted on a local,
user-by-user, or adapted-to-equipment basis.
Take this more as an example than an proposal:
Keyword Possible interpretation
-----------------------------------------------------------------
%Header1( ... ) bigger & bold, centered
%Header2( ... ) bigger, centered
%Header3( ... ) bold
%Quote( ... ) italic, left and right indent
...
Matts,
You have just successfully invented "generic markup" (as distinct from
"formatting markup") and, although the syntax is different, SGML.
I would quibble, as I have quibbled with the SGML folks for about a
decade, that "HeaderN" is not quite generic enough, that one really
wants things like "ParagraphHeader", "SectionHeader",..., but that is
down in the noise and much more relevant to really complex documents
than to "richmail".
For a lot of purposes, this type of generic markup model is infinitely
superior to passing uneditable (and unreadable in the absense of
adequate processors) Page Description Languages around.
If you can get hold of it easily, you might find James Coombs et al,
"Markup Systems and the Future of Scholarly Text Processing", CACM
30(11), November 1987, amusing.
--john