First of all, a clarification: my previous mail about deferring to
Stef's wisdom referred to his mail with a date of " Wed, 05 Feb 92
19:55:21 PST", not his mail dated "Thu, 06 Feb 92 01:05:44 PST", which I
disagree violently with. I can imagine immense confusion resulting from
this point, but that's the order I read them in.
Having said that....
I really didn't want to reach the point of saying this, but I fear I must:
Pulling richtext out of the RFC is very close to a SHOW-STOPPER for me.
I can live with pulling it out, but ONLY if the richtext RFC comes out
in a way that is completely synchronized with the MIME RFC.
I believe that a rich text facility is one of the most important parts
of MIME, and I will strongly resist removing it. While I can agree to
putting it in a parallel RFC, it has to be REALLY parallel, which will
mean delaying MIME. I could more easily live with a version of richtext
that had a thousand major flaws -- as opposed to the one minor flaw we
were discussing -- than with a version of MIME that lacked any richtext
facility.
Those of you who've been following this list all last year will remember
that I didn't even whimper when my original proposal for richtext syntax
was changed radically, to the current SGML-like syntax. That's because
I don't believe the syntactic details really matter a whit, when it
comes right down to it. What matters is that we have SOME lingua franca
for richtext, ASAP. WHATEVER we choose will be flawed, and will be
replaced by a richtext2 a few years hence. But we need to get started
NOW.
In case you haven't guessed, I feel extremely strongly about this. --
Nathaniel