Excerpts from bulk.interesting.lists: 20-Aug-98 Re: format=flowed : why
not.. Chris Newman(_at_)innosoft(_dot_)co (1588*)
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.
It seems to me that something like this was actually discussed early
on in the MIME drafting. I don't remember why it lost out, but I do
remember that it turned out to be a lot more complicated than it
sounded.
If anybody is interested in that last go-round way back in '93, the
proposal that Bill Janssen and I put together (which we called
"text/simplemail") can be found at
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Evan_Kirshenbaum/SimpleMail/rfc.ps
--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
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|closest to applying...
kirshenbaum(_at_)hpl(_dot_)hp(_dot_)com | Richard M.
Hartman
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http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Evan_Kirshenbaum/