Marc, Bill,
Perhaps I should resist saying this, but it's hard.
What you're suggesting is called _presentational markup_, and I
think it's generally very appropriate for mail. Basically, we've had
this sort of presentational markup for a long time. I have a little
program which prints out messages with italics and boldface based on
matching _ and * delimiters around words. Works like a charm.
Amazingly, SGML can also handle this. (Not all SGML aficionados
are equally enthusiastic about it, but SGML does support it.) If we
say that, instead of <italic> (or "<it>", or whatever), we use "_",
and instead of </italic> (etc) we use "_", and that they have to be
paired properly, and then do the same with <bold> and *, I'm happy. I
can then stuff this down my SGML parser, and my parser will understand
the _foo_ and *bar*. Such things are already used for quotes in text,
"like this", which should come out as you favorite opening and closing
quotation marks. (Actually, pity that ASCII didn't specify opening
and closing quotation marks, but it's a little late, now.)
Paragraphs can be separated by a blank line, examples can begin
with a tab, signatures can be delimited with --, and...
The problem is that it's difficult to use these rigorously, so
that the enhanced texts may be more difficult to use electronically,
and that's not what we want, is it? The present richtext spec does
provide a certain rigor to the markup, and this means we can check it,
and validate it, and use it without a lot of heuristics.
SGML has a strong influence from the "keyboarding" arena, in that
it should be possible to both read and type SGML markup without very
special software. I see richtext as deviating from such a worthy
goal, if Nathaniel's messages are anything to judge by. The
suggestions by Marc and Bill fascilitate ease of keyboarding, and it's
easy to read, to boot. However, there are limits to how functional an
extremely easy to type mechanism can be. There are only so many
delimiters, and most of them are already used for something.
So, although I may favor these simple presentational markup means,
I don't think we should stop there and chuck all of richtext.
Regards,
</Erik>
--
Erik Naggum | +47-295-0313 | ISO 8879 SGML | Memento,
Naggum Software | | DIS 10744 HyTime | terrigena.
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vita brevis.