At 11:31 AM 9/4/93 -0500, Rick Troth wrote:
Sure, << looks better. Again, so what?
For pete's sake, don't make the protocol fit your eyes,
it's gotta fit the "eyes" of a myriad of different computers,
most of which neither you nor I have seen.
The desire is for the protocol to fit the eyes of people using mail readers
that do not understand the spec.
The difficulty of writing a parser for text/richtext or text/enriched is
hardly significant compared with the other problems mailer authors must
tackle (RFC 822 address syntax, for example), so I really don't think
implementation difficulty is an issue.
If, by complicating the syntax a little, we can make something that is
acceptable to non-MIME readers, that's definitely worthwhile.
However, all the flak my users have given me about quoted-printable leads
me to believe that this goal (acceptability of raw rich text to non-MIME
readers) is laughable.
Yes, nerds may prefer "x << y" 10:1 over "x <lt> y", but there are many
users who will hate them both. And those users will complain to the
senders, and the senders will stop sending text/rich to non-MIME mailers,
making the looks of text/rich utterly irrelevant.
So I guess I agree that how it looks is probably not important. No one
will see it that way anyway.
--
Steve Dorner, Qualcomm Inc.