Re: Richtext and SGML (Was: MIME to Draft Standard)

[rens@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Rens Troost)]

>>>>> On Tue, 19 Jan 93 01:53:30 +0900, erik@poel.juice.or.jp (Erik M. van der Poel) said:

	Erik> We should probably go for some sort of rich text
	Erik> eventually, but I always thought that, who was it, Bill
	Erik> Janssen's, I think, idea of a super lightweight version
	Erik> of richtext that was barely richer than plain text would
	Erik> be kinda neat, at least in the short term.

I agree completely. But action has to be taken soon, if the current
richtext is going to be taken out of MIME. I suppose the 'Mime-Version'
will have to be incremented; there are already several implementations
out there, and more on the way.

Will we alienate the user community by removing richtext from the
standard? Certainly if we delay long enough for commercial
mime-implementors to release.

	Erik> What I mean is, using things like *bold*, /italics/ and
	Erik> _underlining_, and some very simple hard/soft newline
	Erik> handling.

	Erik> The objection that it is hard to match up pairs of *s is
	Erik> simply bogus.  It is very easy for the implementation to
	Erik> ensure that the emitted byte stream contains matched-up
	Erik> pairs of *s, and you could even just have a rule that
	Erik> says that such pairs of *s are always on the same line,
	Erik> even if you have a very long bold segment that spans
	Erik> lines.


How would you handle the line:

   12 * 5 < 11 * 6

It would seem that in your scheme this is about typefaces, and not
arithmetic! I think what you need is an escape character,say '%', with
'%%' being equivalent to the unquoted escape character. It does make
things look uglier, alas. Maybe just quoting the non-format-related
occurrences of your format specifiers. I assume that emphasized text
is a more common thing to want to send than equations or code
snippets.

-Rens
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 /__) /__  /| / (    |  J. Laurens Troost    Lehman Brothers Technical Services
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