It appears that John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> said: >Now that particular argument is interesting, of only >historically. The one piece of the puzzle the IETF mostly did >invent was something called "Rich Text". IIR (it has been years >since I looked at the spec and don't have time today) it would >have given you bold and italics and, if wanted, section >headings. I don't remember what it would have done about >proportional fonts, but the want/need for that is probably more >controversial than your statement above indicates. Nor do I >know whether what Microsoft and others call Rich Text today is >the same thing or compatible. ... That's RFC 1896. It looks a lot like a subset of HTML. It assumes proportional fonts unless you say <fixed>. There's no section headings, though you can fake it with <bigger> and <bold>. I think that what happened is that by the mid 1990s computer systems all had shared libraries, and once you have a web browser, one of those libraries is an HTML renderer. It's a lot easier to feed a text/html part into that existing library than to write a separate stripped down text/enriched renderer. Going the other way, there are HTML editors for web tools which your MUA could just borrow. I expect this isn't a very popular viewpoint in this crowd, but if you can assume all of your readers can render HTML, you can do some nice stuff in your mail. I often get mail from clients where they have a question about what I wrote so they put the question at the top and highlight the quoted text of interest in yellow. That is about two clicks in an HTML editor. R's, John
