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by jcranmer
2476 days ago
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You're basically advocating for text/richtext (aka text/enriched), which was originally proposed explicitly as a replacement for HTML in email. It failed essentially because everyone who didn't want HTML wanted only plain text, and everyone who wanted something like HTML was happy to just use HTML. Factoid of the day: Netscape added support for a <blink> tag to text/enriched bodies, and that support remains in every client that's still using Netscape's MIME code. The comment above this code just says: "Of course, both text/richtext and text/enriched must be enhanced somehow... Or else what would people think." |
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> There are other text formatting standards which meet some of these criteria. In particular, HTML and SGML have come into widespread use on the Internet. However, there are two important reasons that this document further promotes the use of text/enriched in Internet mail over other such standards:
> 1. Most MIME-aware Internet mail applications are already able to either properly format text/enriched mail or, at the very least, are able to strip out the formatting commands and display the readable text. The same is not true for HTML or SGML.
> 2. The current RFC on HTML [RFC-1866] and Internet Drafts on SGML have many features which are not necessary for Internet mail, and are missing a few capabilities that text/enriched already has.
> For these reasons, this document is promoting the use of text/enriched until other Internet standards come into more widespread use. For those who will want to use HTML, Appendix B of this document contains a very simple C program that converts text/enriched to HTML 2.0 described in [RFC-1866].
It sounds to me like text/enriched was being proposed not so much as a replacement for HTML, but because HTML and related technologies were not yet mature enough. This wording expressly frames text/enriched as a stop-gap measure.