Bill,
I happened to be talking with one of our marketers today and the
subject of text formatting came up. I asked what sort of text
capabilities customers had been asking for. Response was either
dead simple text (like what I'm typing now), OR very complex
text (for which we'd launch their word perfect or whatever).
This verifies (somewhat) statements which have been said here.
It goes against my intuition, and goes against your statement:
Sixthly, we want our
markup to satisfy the vast pent-up need for nice-looking messages
surmised by richtext advocates.
Now, I can think up a couple places where we must do some simple
word processing. For instance, automatically breaking long lines
to short lines (to coddle SMTP) and turning them back to long
lines in the receivers UA. But quoted-printable will do this so
rich{text,mail} isn't necessary.
So perhaps dropping richtext(mail) entirely isn't all that
bad an idea? Perhaps people don't ask for it because it hasn't
been in front of them and they haven't thought about it? Does
anybody see real demand for this feature? Did someone on the list
just think it was a cool idea?
If we're defining a text markup language ... (heuristic or not) ...
Why should it be specific to mail? How to get the word processor
vendors to cooperate in establishing this as a standard interchange
format? I think we went down this path before though.
If there's a small amount of formatting and bold/italic'ing power
in a UA, would customers be satisfied with it? Or would they keep
demanding features until it became a full word processor? Will
they be satisfied if we say "Go away, don't bother me.. use your
WYSIWYG package"?
None of which addresses the issues you raise.
Your requirements analysis is probably right on. Again, will users
be satisfied and stop asking for features? Should we not do this
and make UA authors (that's my role here) put in hooks to start
the WYSIWYG editors instead?
I have quibbles about the exact formats.
Footnotes: The practice I've seen is [footnote], not [ footnote ].
General: How to tell between a random use of some special character
and the uses for this special case? That's where heuristics come
in, right? Did those Dartmouth guys write a paper describing the
pits they fell into?
Quotes from others: Not everybody uses "> ". Some use leading
blanks which will screw up your paragraph heuristics. Others use
leading blanks for their input and leave the original unmarked and
unindented.
Emphasis: Sometimes _'s are used for this. Depends on the strength
of the emphasis. I've seen people --==EMPHASISE==-- this way too.
Literals: Are sometimes done as `literal' or ``literal''. I sometimes
use `emphasis', just like you did:
This design, which Erik suggests we call `simpletext', seems to
satisfy all of our six design constraints.
For this to fly as-is will take a lot of cooperation and education
from users.
<- David Herron <david(_at_)twg(_dot_)com> (work)
<david(_at_)davids(_dot_)mmdf(_dot_)com> (home)
<-
<- "That's our advantage at Microsoft; we set the standards and we can change
them."
<- Karen Hargrove of Microsoft quoted in the Feb 1993 Unix Review editorial.