| But what about my main Q?
|
| Everyone seems to be ducking it.
I think that's because it doesn't have a single answer.
| To restate it:
|
| Where a RT message involves font sizes of 18/14/*12*/10, and 12 is
| determined to be the base size, which of the following emissions
| should be the prefered one?
|
| a: <B><B>...</B> ...</B>...<S>...</S>
| b: <B><B>...</B></B><B>...</B>...<S>...</S>
|
| 'a' is clearly an optimized version of 'b', and this optimization
| flows naturally from the way I would like to code it.
|
| 'b' avoids self-nested commands, but is considerably more verbose
| for documents with lotsa sizeing.
The question here is not whether one is an optimization or not, but
whether there is any semantics beyond the formatting command "make this
bigger". An example of such semantics could be "this is part of a
string which I want in bold face", in which case you would lose that
information in case b (since it would be another string). This could
make sense if you asked to "retrieve the fourth top-level bold element"
or somesuch, in which case _a_ above would yield "<b><b>...</b>...</b>",
whereas _b_ would yield "<b><b>...</b></b>". I'm not saying that this
is a meaningful thing to do with richtext messages, but it certainly is
a meaningful thing to do with SGML documents
| BTW, does anyone else share my opinion that RT, as presently
| defined, is a bit too rich?
I think it's way too poor, vague and generally undefined to merit the
name "richtext". It has significant potential, though.
Best regards,
</Erik>