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simplemail (formerly simpletext) and referential markup

1993-02-10 20:03:56
I've decided, with the encouragement of Erik van der Poel, to turn
simplemail (what I first mentioned as simpletext), into an RFC and
register it.  (I've dropped the footnote pursuant to the advice of
net.people, and simplified the newline rules.)

I'd like to add some referential markup to the mainly
descriptive/presentational system, though, and thought I'd solicit
comments from this list.  One particular piece of markup that seems
useful is to refer in the body of the message to a file, or another
message part.  I'm currently thinking that something like ``[ref:
<some-reference-id>]'' will be reasonable for this purpose, so that a
file reference would look like

        [ref: /tmp/foo]

and a message-part reference would look like

        [ref: <a3fd590083.foo.parc.xerox.com>]

There seem to be some alternatives for representing external data.  One
is the message/external-body format, which consists of a comma-separated
list of attributes, including name, access-type, and various others:

        [ref: access-type=anon-ftp, name="/pub/foo/b.tar.Z",
site="parcftp.parc.xerox.com", mode=image]

Another is the proposed Universal Resource Locator [ref:
ftp://info.cern.ch/pub/www/doc/url3.ps], which typically consists of
access-type and name combined in a string:

        [ref: ftp://foo.parc.xerox.com/pub/foo/b.tar.Z]

I've got problems with both.  The MIME message/external-body seems too
long to expect anyone to compose by hand.  The URL lacks information
such as "mode" which is supplied in the message/external-body.  One
would expect a mail UA to already have code to parse/understand the
message/external-body, but not the URL.  Neither seems to specify a way
of referring to another part of a multi-part message.

Another thing I've been thinking of is to re-cast the footnote notion as
referential markup, e.g. [note: a footnote might look like this].  This
seems both clear in intent, easy to parse, and easy to understand upon
seeing the direct presentation.

Comments?

Bill