On Thu, 20 Aug 1998, Dave Crocker wrote:
2. text/paragraph
I hereby withdraw the text/paragraph proposal and throw my support behind
the format=flowed proposal.
It has been demonstrated that the text/paragraph proposal can cause harm
to the installed base (where harm is defined as making things harder for
end users). Regardless of the intent, I think this makes text/paragraph a
non-starter for this problem.
The format=flowed proposal, however, appears to have no negative impact on
the installed base. It may or may not have a positive impact on the
infrastructure (including both old and new clients) -- depending on how
many of the offending paragraph-formatted text generating clients switch
to using format=flowed, and how many non-80-column clients start rendering
format=flowed properly.
Before I'd be willing to support a proposed standard last call on
format=flowed, I'd want to make sure there's strong language discouraging
the use of quoted-printable with it, and that we've had a reasonable
demonstration that it doesn't cause harm to the installed base.
- Chris