I like the simplemail proposal. *Kudos!* I also would like to see a
more formal syntax specified -- this will make it clear what's legal
and what's borderline or beyond. Things like "it would be nice if the
parser was somewhat clever in figuring this or that out" don't help
the poor implementer whose C may be better than her English! (I think
we can borrow the rules for what kinds of punctuation end sentences
from TeX or LaTeX, these are precisely defined and seem to work well
in practice -- at least for English.)
One suggestion: lines starting with "colon space" (instead of "colon
somechar space") currently don't have a defined meaning. We could
assign this the function of "colon single-quote space", making it both
less visually obtrusive and easier to type by hand.
BTW, one variant of emphasis currently used on the net places
underscores between words, like this: _these_words_are_all_italics._
Can this be supported?
:S --Guido van Rossum, CWI, Amsterdam
<Guido(_dot_)van(_dot_)Rossum(_at_)cwi(_dot_)nl>