Sopme past experience, in case it helps...
One difficulty with the SGML standard was that the committee had to deal
with people who wanted to type SGML at their terminals (or card-punches?)
as well as witn those who wanted it to be a behind-the-scenes file
transmission format. A lot of SGML's complexity came from this.
I think that keeping simplemail and richtext separate could be a very good
thing indeed if it helps avoid those problems.
On the other hand, SGML is helped because one can intermix the two styles,
and can go from the terse to the more regular form relatively easily.
What does this say about richtext and simplemail? Perhaps just this:
* don't try and mix the two paradigms, user-agent and typing-by-hand
* consider a migration path from simpetext to richtext as user agents
becomre more common. This simply means that, if this is a preferred
migration path, simplemail concepts should map directly onto richtext ones
if possible.
Lee
--
lee(_at_)sq(_dot_)com (Liam Quin) the barefoot programmer; SoftQuad Inc +1 416
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