Simplicity and Readability
Some writers here have suggested that the markup scheme be simple
enough that people can create marked up text with ordinary, fixed
width editors. They and others argue that the standard should also be
simple enough that messages can be understood with the same
old-fashioned tools.
I'm definitely in the "simple enough to create by hand" camp.
This seems to me a crucial point. The simplemail proposal only makes
sense if we postulate that the sender, the reader, or both are using
plain-ASCII (or EBCDIC or 8859 or ...) text processors; not user
agents. If both are using MIME user agents, they can just as well use
richtext.
This "either-or" distinction isn't right and I believes obscures a significant
segment of the real world. It is perfectly possible to be using a MIME-aware
user agent that does not have the capability of generating richtext. (Note that
the requirements for richtext support have to do with being able to display it,
not create it.)
The user agent I'm using to write this message is just such an agent, as a
matter of fact. It is fully MIME-aware in terms of both the messages it creates
and receives. It cannot, however, create richtext ab initio; the necessary
infrastructure simply isn't there (in particular, I'm using a plain text
terminal to write this, and I don't have a text processor available for this
environment that cranks out richtext). Viewing a substantial fraction of the
complete set of richtext semantics isn't a problem in this environment.
Creating them out of whole cloth is a big problem, however.
To the extent that simpletext offers a means of creating enhanced documents
without having to develop custom text processing software, it is a big
improvement over richtext for a lot of environments. But this in no way implies
that other MIME capabilities aren't there. As a result we don't need to assume
that labelling simpletext as simpletext is a big problem.
For that matter, we should avoid the assumption that no help is available for
composing simpletext. For example, I envision an "electric-simpletext" mode for
my editor which, while it cannot show me right off what the message will really
look like, it can certainly help me out with niggly syntax details.
richtext is just slightly too complex for an electric mode to be very useful. I
once played around a bit with building a "richtext language syntax" mode for
richtext using the language sensitive extensions in my editing environment.
Unfortunately, the result looked just like what it was -- an editor designed to
build richtext programs by insertion/deletion/rearrangement of logical blocks
of language elements. While this might be cool and would keep you honest, it is
a programmer's tool, not a general user's tool.
Ned