My situation causes me to wonder about two things. I generally see mainframes as communication and network server machines. Many of us are using ever more powerful PCs to read our Bitnet mail already. Upgraded networks like NREN can handle the traffic. An advanced standard like this could display and print documents, with color illustrations, in a form extremely close to the original.
Proper software can mark, index, analyze, and do whatever with text regardless of the form it is in.
It seems to me that in general we are letting the relatively low state of the art in mainframe WP software set unreasonably severe limits on document standards when much more is already within reach. They are all profoundly line-oriented. This is no good, of course. But it would be refreshing to come across one of these much-vaunted tools that didn't see a file as primarily a set of lines. None of these can safely be assumed not to be broken across a line boundary.