Excerpts from internet.ietf-822: 13-Dec-91 RFC-XXXX's richtext Guido van
Rossum(_at_)cwi(_dot_)nl (1238)
- Has anyone implemented or attempted to implement text/richtext
beyond the trivial implementation of Appendix D? The draft doesn't
seem to be changed much, nor have I seen much discussion of richtext
on the mailing list, which makes me suspect that everybody is
secretly planning to ignore this particular part of the standard...
I've implemented a richtext-to-Andrew translator, which suffices for
many of my purposes. Eventually, I hope to write a native X richtext
displayer. Also, the draft changed a lot from June to October, but not
that much in this pass.
- There seem to be two different ways to force a line break: enclosing
text in <paragraph> </paragraph> tags or inserting <nl>.
That's right. Some people wanted it each way. Personally, I could
easily live without <paragraph>.
- Has anyone consulted an SGML expert about this? I seem to recall
that SGML prefers to use tags with *semantic* meaning (e.g.,
<emphasis>) rather than *lay-out* meaning such as <Bold>).
I think that the word "prefer" here may be a little strong?
- The <ISO-10646> tag worries me. I seem to recall that 10646 may
come in 2-byte and 4-byte flavors. How am I supposed to find the
corresponding end tag?!?!?! Or us some encoding scheme implied?
I'm not sure what the right answer to this one is. Any suggestions?
(Also, shouldn't there be a charset=... parameter that sets the
initial character set, instead of fixing this to be ASCII?)
No, I think the right solution here, as with MNEMONIC, is to simplify by
having a well-defined initial state. This state, of course, can be
viewed either as US-centric or as backward-compatible, depending on how
friendly you feel... :-)