Mr Stefferud, I fail to see just what point you are trying to make with your
(?ironical) philosophical diatribe.
So, it is really interesting to see this predicted
result actually starting to happen in the open market as
^^^^^^^^
vendors act to give us what we want in their own best
interests.
RTF was developed by Microsoft several years ago, (my recent move has buried my
copy of their spec, so I cant give you an actual date at this time), my
speculation is that they invented it as a concession to the requirements of SMTP
tranmission, but it is also possible that they intended it as a transfer format
for PC/Mac Word/Works interchange. As Rens points out, it has some following,
though it is no panacea. Microsoft will gladly mail the spec to interested
developers.
Note that I am not demanding RTF, the time for that is past, and, on sober
reflection, it may be just as well that we did not adopt it.
If I had been a participant in earlier discussion I would have argued that MIME
RT should provide for *only* a character-styling enhancement, and should defer
more complex document structure to an attachment strategy, which (to me) implys
an off-line reader/composer using some other facility than the mail ua/viewer.
Since my involvement began in July 1992, I must exercise my perogative as UA
implementor and choose to limit my implementation to the core 4 + Bold, Italic,
Underline, Fixed, Smaller, Bigger, and X-MacFond. When I have acquired a copy
of the recently published Unicode standard, I may also choose to add X-Unicode
content mapping suport (unless apple beats me to the punch by provideing Unicode
mapping facilities).
Such complex strutures as indent/outdent and super/subscript have no *cheap*
suport on the Mac, and I suspect that other platforms are not much better
equiped. Generic Text engines are expensive, especially with the current trend
to polyglot language support, and IMO have no place in a Mail UA, even a GUI
based one. (I get headaches every time I think about rolling my own split cursor
support for complex languages sa Arabic.)
---- Enough on the moving target aspect of this rfc.
Again I ask. Can we *please* come to a consensus as to what the semantics of RT
*should* be, so that I can actually get on with this implementation of it?
Sometime, like *REAL SOON*?????
This is not something I feel comfortable originating on my own, but if that were
desirable (as expresed by ietf-822 consensus), I would do it (gobble, gobble).
Yes, I will be tolerant on the receiving end, but I want to have some definitive
answer as to what the F*** I am supposed to be transmitting.
--
Dana S Emery <de19(_at_)umail(_dot_)umd(_dot_)edu>