On Thu, 20 Aug 1998, Daniel Glazman wrote:
Chris Newman wrote:
P.S. There is significant evidence that it's too hard to make SGML-based
markup recipient friendly.
Can you please give us examples ? I'd be very happy to read these
evidences...
The prime examples are text/enriched and text/html. Both were registered
in the "text" tree only under the condition that the media types would be
generated in such a way that a human would be able to easily read them
without an enriched or html interpretor. There were grand assurances from
all the client vendors that this would be no problem.
It turns out that *every* client which generates text/enriched or
text/html results in largely unreadable output, and that includes the
vendors who gave us assurances about how it would be readable.
It may be possible to make this stuff readable, but it requires very
careful engineering -- doing things like merging adjacent style runs,
keeping careful track of the plain-text output column, pushing paragraph
markers to the right edge, making sure spurious plain-text newlines aren't
inserted, not generating boilerplate at the beginning and so forth. The
fact nobody has done this is adequate evidence that it's too hard to be
practical.
In hindsight, we should have developed a markup language using tricks like
_italics_, *bold* and >excerpt for email, so that the markup language
itself would be plain text. Even that would require style-run merging,
but it probably would have worked. Unfortunately, it's too late to
introduce something like that now.
- Chris