Well, you can use DXL of course, but then that is a bit of a hassle and a lot slower than just using the richtexttable classes

I don't see how this code is more of a hassle than using the rich text apis. With these methods available, I would consider using the rich text apis to be premature optimization for the example given. The dxl exporter underneath could load lazily once per session. If performance is a real problem, you can always drop down to the other apis. In the mean time, development is faster and there is less code to maintain. The code is also much more readable and less error prone.

I prefer a more declarative approach...'what to do' not 'how to do it'.

The whole Rich Text idea is kinda corrupted. There should be only HTML, which the Notes client displays exactly in the same way as Firefox. People should remember that the whole idea of the Notes Client was to be a world-wide TCP/IP browser, somehow Mozilla was faster and won the race, but it's not too late to adopt to the current standards.

Sean obviously knows this, but in case anybody else is unclear on the "3rd party tools" he is mentioning, at least one is our Midas Rich Text LSX (see { Link } ) which does this quite easily. There is a huge difference in both performance and usability when you can change the rich text in place rather than exporting and importing, but obviously that is my biased opinion.