that extra bracketing was not meant to be taken literally, later
on in it I sugested a 2 character bracketing system:
Sigh. The design of text/enriched has continually gotten stuck, I
believe, on the conflict between power and simplicity. I also believe
this is inevitable, given the design goals; we're trying to choose a
single point on a contiuum where simplicity and power trade off.
There's almost certainly no absolutely "right" point on that continuum
to be. I'm generally inclined to favor simplicity over power, mostly
because there's no shortage of arbitrarily powerful rich text languages
out there. So I guess I would prefer see <param> eliminated entirely,
thus simplifyinging the spec, rather than see additional complexity
added to the basic command syntax. Of course, I don't think this is an
either/or choice, that's just my take on which direction I'd rather move
if we had to move in one direction or another.
In other words, I think that, inevitably, text/enriched is neither
powerful enough to do everything nor simple enough to satisfy everyone,
but that if we were to change it from its current spec, we'd be better
off simplifying even further at the expense of power. I'm curious
whether this basic attitude is shared by the other participants in this
discussion. -- Nathaniel