it is pretty cool... I'm just not ready to support users on it yet with questions and such since I'm just going to be launching gmail on my site and will probably have enough to deal with... also, it gives me something to add later that gets users excited :)

I believe the default is that if they are using IE5+ and they have compose in html set up in their options, then it will automatically give them the page with the html editor, otherwise the plain page since it's not supported in other browsers/versions. That's what the if is_ie5 stuff is for. There might be something in the admin that lets you specify whether the default for users is html or text, but I'm not sure. Maybe someone else will chime in.

HTH