Re: hyperRTF?

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Date: Wed, 22 Jun 1994 23:51:36 +0200
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From: Nathan Torkington <Nathan.Torkington@vuw.ac.nz>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
Subject: Re: hyperRTF?
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Chris Lilley, Computer Graphics Unit writes:

> In general, however, those who want to do page design want it AS
> WELL AS structure.

How wonderful for them.  Let me introduce you to something called
``styles''.  RTF has them.  HTML doesn't (yet).  RTF lets you apply a
label to a set of visual attributes and these then become like SGML
tags for your RTF text.  Those style labels can be used for semantic
indexing, just as SGML tags can be.

> Ha! and which Microsoft products will suport these extensions?

As another writer said, the Microsoft Help system is hypertext, and
the conversion program uses a similar system to the one I proposed to
convert RTF into a hypertextual proprietary format.  We would do away
with the proprietary format.

> RTF is an unstable proprietary standard. By unstable I mean poorly
> documented and often changed by its owners without informing the
> user base or the developer base.

Microsoft need to make any future version of RTF ``back-compatible''
with old programs, for one simple reason: they use it as an
interchange format, and there's sod all point in writing a document in
an interchange format that no other bugger can read.

> While a multi-platform viewer for some particular version of RTF is
> to be welcomed, in the same way that a multi-platform viewer for
> Quicktime was welcomed, it is not an appropriate substitute for
> HTML.

Nope, but it sounds good enough to sit beside HTML.  HTML (as
currently defined) is fine for simple tasks.  Real Document Preparers
hate HTML.  I know this, I've worked with them.  They want more
control over presentation (a-la HTML) and RTF gives them this without
sacrificing the ability to have semantic indexing, etc.

Yours in patience,

Nat