At 7:18 AM 1/19/93 -0500, Rens Troost wrote:
Will we alienate the user community by removing richtext from the
standard? Certainly if we delay long enough for commercial
mime-implementors to release.
One of MIME's principal attractions to me is the *inclusion* of a richtext
scheme. One theme I hear from my user community is that senders wish to
specify the presentation of their message to their intended recipients.
Richtext provides a simple mechanism to specify the most commonly requested
attributes: style and spacing.
Quoting from the RFC:
One of the major goals in the design of richtext was to make it so simple
that even text-only mailers will implement richtext-to-plain-text
translators, thus increasing the likelihood that multifont text will become
"safe" to use widely.
The advent of MIME does not imply the disappearance of all terminal-based
users from the Internet. There must be a graceful transition from the
world of glass-ttys to a window-based world. Without it there will be
little motivation to provide interoperable mailers between them. Removing
richtext removes one of the bridges between these worlds.
Granted, implementing richtext may increase the complexity of mailers that
would implement MIME. But because interoperability is one of the hallmarks
of Internet programming, it is worth the trouble to do this.
john noerenberg
jwn2(_at_)qualcomm(_dot_)com
noerenberg.j (Applelink)
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That which has always been accepted by everyone, everwhere,
is almost certain to be false.
-- John Millington Synge "Tel Quel" [1943]
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