Re: Suggestions

[Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk>]

>>>>> "KZ" == Ketil Z <ketil@ii.uib.no> writes:

KZ> 1) Didn't work for me, I tried to metamail it, as Per suggests, but
KZ>   nothing happened.  I see the <tag> tags. 

I had to set MAILCAPS to make it work.  The default mailcaps file was
located in _\b/_\bp_\ba_\bc_\bk_\b/_\bm_\be_\bt_\ba_\bm_\ba_\bi_\bl_\b/_\be_\bt_\bc_\b/_\bm_\ba_\bi_\bl_\bc_\ba_\bp, while the metamail expected
_\b/_\bu_\bs_\br_\b/_\bl_\bo_\bc_\ba_\bl_\b/_\be_\bt_\bc_\b/_\bm_\ba_\bi_\bl_\bc_\ba_\bp.  Maybe your metamail has the same installation
glitch. 

KZ> 2) This is a very unSGMLish approach.  It lets people mark text as
KZ>   italic or bold, what they should do, is specify what parts of a
KZ>   message is what, and leave it to the client to decide what it looks
KZ>   like.

KZ> MIME «text/enriched» is ugly, broken and evil, and should be buried 
KZ> in a crossroads at midnight together with Quoted-Unreadable, Netscape
KZ> Extentions, and Bill Gates.

Well, we need s\bso\bom\bme\bet\bth\bhi\bin\bng\bg better than plain newline terminated ascii,
and even if we don't we are going to get it soon anyway.
_\bt_\be_\bx_\bt_\b/_\be_\bn_\br_\bi_\bc_\bh_\be_\bd is too little, too late, so donøt worry too much about
that.  My guess is that we will soon see _\bt_\be_\bx_\bt_\b/_\bh_\bt_\bm_\bl as the dominating
content type.  This might not be what the SGML purist would prefer,
but it beats the hell of the alternative, which would be
_\ba_\bp_\bp_\bl_\bi_\bc_\ba_\bt_\bi_\bo_\bn_\b/_\bm_\bs_\b-_\bw_\bo_\br_\bd.


There once were a text format called seetext, which was based on a
formalization of informal conventions like *bold* and _italic_.  It
was easily readable as plain text, yet quite powerful.  I can't find
it with archie or on the web, so I guess it has died by now.
Otherwise, it would have been a nice format to support.