it is not unusual to see messages which contain an encoding called
"setext". The idea of this encoding is to encode italics, bold face
and underscore in a way which looks neat also to recipients whose
mailers do not understand the encoding.
I've never heard it called "setext" before.
The principle is to write "**" before and after bold face text,
"~" before and after italics and "_" before and after underscored
words.
Of course, if such a convention is used, there should be information
about this in the mail header, so that the recieving mailer knows
whether to interpret these codes or show them as they are to
the recipient.
Question 1: Is there an Internet standard in existence or in
development for setext or something similar?
This is quite close to the simpletext proposal that was circulated on this list
some time back. It should be in the list archives, if nowhere else. I don't
think there's an I-D for it right now. If memory serves, simpletest had *bold*
and _underline_ and some other stuff for doing tables and indentation levels. I
don't think it had ~italics~, but I like the idea.
Question 2: Is there a defined way to indicate in the Mime
header fields of a message that the message uses such an
encoding?
Simpletext used a content-type of text/simpletext, I believe. It seems obvious
to me that this sort of thing is a content type of its own and properly should
be a subtype of text.
Ned