Formatted text, styled text or rich text, as opposed to plain text, has styling information beyond the minimum of semantic elements: colours, styles , sizes and special features .-Terminology:...
A file format is a particular way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file.Since a disk drive, or indeed any computer storage, can store only bits, the computer must have some way of converting information to 0s and 1s and vice-versa. There are different kinds of formats for...
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
, defined by the IETF in RFC 1896 and associated with the text/enrichedMIME
MIME
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions is an Internet standard that extends the format of email to support:* Text in character sets other than ASCII* Non-text attachments* Message bodies with multiple parts...
type. It is "intended to facilitate the wider interoperation of simple enriched text across a wide variety of hardware and software platforms". Today, enriched text is almost unknown in e-mail traffic, while HTML e-mail
HTML e-mail
HTML email is the use of a subset of HTML to provide formatting and semantic markup capabilities in email that are not available with plain text.Most graphical email clients support HTML email, and many default to it...
is widely used. Some people see enriched text, or at least the subset of HTML that can be transformed into enriched text, as a superior format for use with e-mail (mainly because of security considerations).
A predecessor of this text/enriched MIME type was called text/richtext in RFC 1341 and RFC 1521. Neither should be confused with Rich Text Format
Rich Text Format
The Rich Text Format is a proprietary document file format with published specification developed by Microsoft Corporation since 1987 for Microsoft products and for cross-platform document interchange....
(MIME type text/rtf or application/rtf) which is an entirely different specification, devised by Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
.
A single newline in enriched text is treated as a space. Formatting commands are in the same style as SGML and HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
. They must be balanced and nested. These are in other words two examples of valid enriched text:
Hello, world!
Hello, world!
The following, on the other hand, is not:
Hello, world!
An example
As an example, the following enriched text:
redBlood is thicker than bluewater.
left-- Well-known proverb
would yield
Enriched text is a supported format of Emacs and Mulberry
Mulberry (e-mail client)
Mulberry is a formerly proprietary, now open sourced email client marketed by Cyrusoft from approximately 1995 to 2005. On October 1, 2005, Cyrusoft International, Inc./ISAMET, declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy and went out of business...
