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Re: Richtext and SGML

1992-02-06 08:31:44
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

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