Finding a middle between HTML and plain text E-mail
In response to Michael at mcwresearch and Michael (LV) at terminal23, I’m surprised there has been no middle-ground adoption that gives users ability to format text (colors, bold, italic, underline, bullets, etc), without the nastiness of HTML and without the plainness of plain text. It looks like enriched text (RFC 1896) was supposed to do this, but never seemed to catch on.
I’ve been using the following for “formatting” in plain text, and it has gotten the point across OK so far:
- STRONG = bold
- _underline_ = underlined
- /italic/ = italic
- * = bullet
And the problem with rich text is it brings MS Word into the mix, with its own set of problems.
Simple text editors for PC’s should be like Textedit for the Mac…you get your bold, your underline, your italics, but you don’t achieve any of it with the side affects of an app that can make system calls or inject code into other running processes. Thats one of the downsides of Word and IE being written by the same folks who write the OS. Their apps are too familiar and too dependent on functions that should be reserved for the OS and not overlying apps.
Rich Text Format is an entirely different specification than “enriched text.”
It’s spec is defined here