1341-richtext has not proven to be the useful, ubiquitous, generally
accepted standard that everyone was looking for in a "rich text"
environment. There are no commercial-off-the-shelf word processors
that generate text in 1341-richtext format, no overwhelming use
of 1341-richtext in other internet environments where markup might
be considered useful (eg RFCs), and only passing support for
it (view only) in most MIME software.
Yes, it is important for people to send around boldface and underlines
in their texts. But let's face it here, IETF is not a place to
invent word processors, it's a place to work on communications
protocols. It is outside of the traditional scope of IETF activities
to go off inventing things and then hoping people would adhere to them -
the rallying cry if you remember is that is the ISO way!
My recommendatino to the working group would be
- remove references to the details of 1341-richtext from the MIME RFC,
and replace them with pointers to another document
- in that other document provide an overview of ascii formats for
markup of text designed to be in what is roughly considered "rich
text" format, including
* a spec for and history of 1341-richtext
* a similar treatment of the Microsoft RTF format
* a similar treatment of another commercial available format (?)
* a note on SGML and how it might fit
This second document should provide the implementor with
Content-type:
registrations for these other rich formats, code or pointers to
code that strips the formatting out, and a spec or a pointer to
a spec so that someone could build a new minimally conformant system
from scratch.
The other useful thing to do would be to poll implementors and see how
far they have gotten to shipping the Microsoft RTF format around, and
determine whether there's existing practice that has been shown to
work that's suitable for writing up in an RFC.
--Ed
Edward Vielmetti, vice president for research, Msen Inc.
emv(_at_)Msen(_dot_)com
Msen Inc., 628 Brooks, Ann Arbor MI 48103 +1 313 998 GLOB