First off, congrats to the simplemail people. You've almost convinced me
to switch camps from text/enriched. :-) My implementation plan from now on
is to support both. The simplemail scheme certainly has a lot going for it:
I've been trying to come up with a good way to edit rich mail using
conventional text editors for quite some time, and simplemail looks like the
way to go, being robust in the face of editing changes in a way that the
richtext scheme couldn't be.
Just a short comment on Jerry Sweet's alternative for literal text:
:--
int a[10]
for (i=0; i <=10; i++)
{
a[i] = i
}
:--
While more concise, it doesn't offer robustness in the face of changes during
quoting, which appears to be one of the simplemail design goals. Witness the
quoting I did above. If I delete the first line, then this reply will be
messed up when formatted by a smart simplemail formatter.
If the amount of literal text is very extensive, it would probably be better
for it to be put into a separate text/plain MIME body part, so for small
amounts of literal text the ":'" convention shouldn't be too bad in practice.
Cheers,
Rhys.