I think adding RTF as a subtype to MIME is an excellent idea. I also
think that it should wait until after MIME goes to draft standard and
then added as an extension. I suspect that RTF will probably have to
be base64 encoded. And there will have to be a list what versions of
RTF a MIME complaint Mail User Agent should support (for minimum
compliance).
So far I have heard two arguments against the "richtext" that is
within RFC 1341. The first is that is not pretty (i.e. simple) enough
and the commands could be replaced with shorter characters. This is a
"pretty" lame argument. While I will concede that the number of
characters per command could easily be shorter I don't see how that
makes richtext any more readable or enhances the ability of a SGML
parser to be able to deal with it.
The second argument is that the definition of 1341-richtext is
ambiguous (or rather that there are ambiguities in the definition that
could cause problems for the reader program). This is not an argument
that I am familiar with. The definition seems to be pretty tight to
me. Could someone please enlighten me on the details of this argument.
---Jack