David, you know better than I what the commercial marketplace requires.
It seems clear that nothing short of full SGML or Adobe Acrobat will
satisfy some people, and that does seem to be a marketing point. But
that's OK; those options *are* available. I am proposing we take the
heuristic approaches already in use, and develop a markup specification
from them. I personally would rather send any but the simplest messages
as Andrew or Slate data objects.
Excerpts from direct: 21-Jan-93 Re: simpletext: an alternat.. "David
Herron"@twg.com (3179)
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.
I'm not proposing heuristic interpretation. If people mark excerpts
with something other than a leading "> ", it's not simpletext, and
doesn't use Content-Type: text/simpletext. Same for --++==BIZARRE==++--
modes of emphasis. Simpletext is just for the convenience of those who
wish to follow an agreed-upon syntax for simple markup. Any simpletext
processor will assume that the enclosed text follows the rules (by the
way, did you notice the way my mail sending tool wrapped the lines of
the literals? Should have quoted-printable it.).
Sixthly, we want our
markup to satisfy the vast pent-up need for nice-looking messages
surmised by richtext advocates.
Check the meaning of ``surmise'' and eval my sentence again.
Footnotes: The practice I've seen is [footnote], not [ footnote ].
Yes, I added the spaces to make it a bit less likely to misparse.
Literals: Are sometimes done as `literal' or ``literal''. I sometimes
use `emphasis', just like you did:
Indeed. The rules in style guides for this kind of thing are
disappointingly contradictory.
For this to fly as-is will take a lot of cooperation and education
from users.
And it may not be worth it.
Bill