ietf-822
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Re: Text/Enhanced straw man

1993-02-15 06:28:37
|>    -o It should be trivial to type.
|
|Yes, but the intention should be to use a good composing agent.
|People won't be able to type it exactly right.

I'm afraid I disagree.  I think requiring a composing agent

I agree.  We shouldn't *require* a composing agent.  It should be
*possible* to type it by hand.

If you type it by hand, though, you have to remember that the thing at
the receiving end is an automaton, and that you need to type it
exactly right, otherwise you get undesired effects.  For example, if
you want to say

   So you take the C files (*.c) and the header files (*.h) and ...

then you have to remember that the asterisks will trigger "emphasis"
handling, so you need to "escape" them.  This may be the reason why
Bill chose the format

   <non-alphanumeric> <asterisk> <text> <asterisk> <non-alphanumeric>

i.e. like *this*, but I think we need to generalize the format so that
we can emphasize *parts* of words, e.g. DEcode and ENcode, which you
often see people doing on the net.


I know for my part, if I can't remember it and type it, I won't use
it; my composing agent is my editor, and I don't intend learn a new
tool just for sending pretty email.

There may be other people that are used to using things like Microsoft
Word to generate faxes, and who, for some reason, would like to start
using email too.  (Fat chance? :-)  For those people, it would be nice
to have some program that automatically converts MS Word's "bold", etc
to the text/enhanced stuff. 1/2 :-)


Erik


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