I imagine that GNU Emacs mail mode, for instance, would by default
attach MIME headers to send a message as ``text/simplemail'', rather
than the user having to say so explicitly.
This smacks of DWIM (Do What I Mean). DWIM is a pipe dream. (What
are you smoking? I wanna try it. :-)
More seriously: Why is it that people use previewers (on the screen)
before sending their documents to the printer?
Answer: Because they want to make sure that what they've typed will
look right, so that they don't waste paper on mistakes.
If a sender types
Look for *akefile* and then choose the one that...
and the receiver sees
Look for akefile and then choose the one that...
on the screen (with the "akefile" in italics), then the receiver is
going to be confused, especially if he's a novice. (You may say that
this example is contrived, and you'd probably be right, but I think
I've made a point.)
A better scenario for the above example: The sender types the text as
above, and then feeds it to a previewer (or perhaps some sort of
syntax checker that interactively goes through the asterisks, asking
the user whether it was what he meant, though I think I'd prefer a
previewer, or even a WYSIWYG editor (with an optional dumb terminal
previewer!), but that's a matter of personal taste).
More generally, I think that all of this comes down to the old
networking rule: Be conservative in what you send...
You can make it easy on the sender if you allow him to just type the
syntax, but then you're putting the burden on the receiver. The
receiver either has to obtain some AI tool the does DWIM, or he has to
try to figure out what you meant by looking at the raw bytes, or he
uses some reasonable tool that gets it right when the syntax is
correct (but gets it wrong when the sender goofed).
In the world of networking, making things easy for the receiver is a
Good Thing. (I think someone else on this list said this too.)
Erik