It seems to me from the sidelines that:
1) "later" is in fact NOW. So Erik should speak up NOW in DETAIL,
or not be surprised if his desired results don't happen.
2) Erik needs to make a specific detailed proposal of exactly what he
wants to see and put that proposal onto the list for general review
and discussion. There are so many different perceptions of what Erik
really wants (I no longer claim to really understand what he wants)
that it is important for him to put it down in detailed words at
this time. The proposal should have enough information that a
competent MIME-aware programmer could go off and have a decent chance
of implementing it correctly (like any other Internet specification).
3) Once Erik has done (2) then folks should stop, wipe core, and read his
proposal with a clean mind -- and then comment on issues they see. The
current discussion is not terribly constructive because folks are NOT all
talking abut the same thing.
4) There is consensus, in any case, that Richtext should be spun off from
the main MIME RFC and put into its own RFC and clearly made optional to
implement. If it really is valuable, then it will stand on its own merits.
If it isn't valuable, then we should not burden the rest of MIME by trying
to mandate it.
5) There are a large number of folks who have observed that there is
widespread confusion of the commercial "Rich Text Format (RTF)" and
MIME Richtext -- those making the observation all seem to feel that
RTF is well entrenched and that the MIME Richtext should be renamed to
something less confusion. I'd like to see the MIME authors seriously
consider this as I expect to be using MIME for a long long time.
Ran
atkinson(_at_)itd(_dot_)nrl(_dot_)navy(_dot_)mil