Please send them to me. If the slightly extended way seems reasonable,
why not? But wouldn't you need multibyte recognition for *all* richtext
readers then, even those only supporting us-ascii?
Not necessarily. The "charset" option can be used on the Content-type line
to indicate whether the message is us-ascii only or mixed-language.
I'll upload the document to the list soon.
I was under the impression that the next round has already started,
Yep. Whether or not the others want to worry about richtext until other
problems are solved is another matter though. :)
You write:
The example program wasn't meant to be a richtext formatter - it was meant
to demonstrate the minimum amount of work necessary to convert richtext into
something more or less readable by humans.
You missed my point. If the example of a simple richtext parser
does not satisfy the MINIMAL CONFORMANCE requirements for richtext
(because it doesn't convert newline to space, even though this is REQUIRED),
then what good is it to include in the RFC? Besides, the compliant version is
shorter and cleaner :-)
I think you'll find that _not_ converting newline to space in the simple
richtext -> text translator is desirable. Otherwise you'll get extremely long
lines, which won't display well. A real honest-to-goodness version would have
to take those lines and perform word-wrapping. Not converting keeps things
to the original line sizes which will more than likely fit within a normal
screen width. Just an observation ...
I agree with your "minimal conformance" comments, but in this case, better
formatted output is acheived by ignoring it. Look at it this way: a conformant
implementation that does word-wrapping would convert the newline into a space
and then convert it back into a newline. :-) A note in the next draft is
in order about this seemingly non-conformance, or two example programs.
I agree with you on the space compression, though; although it is very
nice to have and doesn't cost much code, it need not be required.
Not for minimal conformance, but for real formatters, it will certainly be
necessary. Some very strange output can be produced when spaces are considered
to be "hard".
Cheers,
Rhys.