Bill,
As I understand it, the only purpose of RichText is to slightly raise the level
of formatting/character styles that can be effectively transmitted between
heterogeneous mail agents. The critical characteristics seem to be that the
set of attributes defined be small, simple, and well-specified.
Yes, we all understand why declarative mark-up is better than procedural
mark-up, but the fact of that matter is that if RichText defined a
declarative mark-up scheme it would have effectively zero impact on the content
of heterogeneous mail exchange. I'm still relatively pessimistic about
RichText's impact since I disagree with Nathaniel's basic premise (that
casual use of font changes is important and is the dominant feature used when
user's are given multimedia mail tools).
From the discussion, it seems clear that the goal of "well-specified" wasn't
quite met. That should be the critical goal - the actual decisions made
(<underline><underline> =? double underline) are relatively unimportant.
Terry