Xref: utzoo comp.archives.admin:116 comp.text.sgml:264 comp.mail.misc:5798 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!caen!ox.com!msen.com!emv From: emv@msen.com (Ed Vielmetti) Newsgroups: comp.archives.admin,comp.text.sgml,comp.mail.misc Subject: Re: Commercial Archives Message-ID: Date: 25 Jun 91 00:49:35 GMT References: <1991Jun24.193928.21180@newshost.anu.edu.au> Sender: usenet@ox.com (Usenet News Administrator) Organization: MSEN, Inc. Ann Arbor MI Lines: 57 In-Reply-To: cmf851@anu.oz.au's message of Mon, 24 Jun 91 19:39:28 GMT Content-Type: text-plus/richtext As far as it is feasible the IETF "richmail" project is being pushed to use as simple a subset of SGML as possible so that people can type it in by hand and not have it distract too much from the actual text. in article 1991Jun24.193928.21180@newshost.anu.edu.au cmf851@anu.oz.au (Albert Langer) writes: However if a suitable SGML document type HAS been defined for your purposes then you ought to publish it and reference it as a public text. Then you can use a MUCH less verbose (but equally readable) notation - e.g. omitting or shortening most of the end markers and making use of various abbreviations and typist techniques. There's good reasons not to use the SGML minimization rules, not the least of which is to minimize the amount of work that "dumb" user agents have to do to strip out the formatting information. To quote from the internet draft -- NOTE ON THE RELATIONSHIP OF RICHTEXT TO SGML: Richtext is decidedly not SGML, and should not be used to transport arbitrary SGML documents. Those who wish to use SGML document types as a mail transport format should define a new text-plus subtype, e.g. "text-plus/sgml-dtd-whatever". Richtext is designed to be compatible with SGML, and specifically so that it will be possible to define a richtext DTD if that is desired. However, this does not imply that arbitrary SGML can be called richtext, nor that richtext implementors have any need to understand SGML; the description in this memo is a complete definition of richtext. The approach of avoiding the complicated minimization rules facilitates treatment of the text by more general systems, such as Open Text System's PAT, which can be taught to recognize very simple tagging schemes but which don't have facilities for disambiguating whether a minimized end-tag matches one or more begin-tags. I also hope to have a system built in GNU Emacs, and while the richtext scheme seems easy enough with it I don't have any intention of hacking full-blown SGML in emacs. As an extreme example, all of the markup in this document is one tag per line, which is extremely easy to wipe out with even with grep -v. Edward Vielmetti, vice president for research, MSEN Inc. emv@msen.com By the way, Ed, I think you may be the first person in the history of the world to successfully send a multifont email message to someone who wasn't using the same software with which the message was composed. Congratulations! nsb@thumper.bellcore.com