For this to fly as-is will take a lot of cooperation and
education from users.
Maybe not, as I understand it, Bill is proposing that we adopt certain markup
conventions which are in common use.
Presumably, a compliant MIME-UA will be invisibly handling all the gory details
of mapping the "presentation" display for the composing user, thus no training
is needed there, and the receiver either has a UA which presents a pretty
version of it, or she sees it raw, and reads it employing that particular set of
conventions, drawing on the same background as we will have.
I think this proposal has much merit, and deserves deeper consideration.
BTW, [...] is more commonly used for editorial commentary than footnotes, in my
experience. [ ... ] might be sufficient distinguishment for an automaton, but I
am not sure I would trust a human to see the difference in the raw.
--
dana s emery <de19(_at_)umail(_dot_)umd(_dot_)edu>