I would suggest that any text formatting be handled similar to
X-window Motif strings, which are a C-type XmString.
I strongly oppose this concept. It reeks of a proprietary bias (towards
both OSF & Motif) and is not a technical solution that we can use now
and expect people to read despite older mailers (as Erik noted above).
The richtext solution seems vastly preferable.
Thank you Ran, I've been trying to figure out how to formulate a
response that expresses the above thought without being rude.
Folks, the Internet is not U**X, U**X isn't OSF, and even OSF is not
Motif and X. This is not a plausible solution for the very large number
of older and/or smaller and/or cheaper machines that operate as Internet
hosts. Models such as richtext are closely related to established (and
widely-supported) International Standards such as SGML), can be
supported in several different ways in a variety of different machine
types, and are plausibly readable on hosts that don't know that they are
different from ASCII. Seems to me that those are *very* powerful
advantages compared to a form that is mostly extremely convenient on
hosts that, almost by definition, have the surplus horsepower lying
around to convert rapidly from more abstract and generic formats.
--john