From: Mark Crispin <MRC(_at_)CAC(_dot_)Washington(_dot_)EDU>
Subject: Re: Character-set header (was Re: Minutes of the Atlanta 822ext
meeting)
On Thu, 5 Sep 91 18:00:41 PDT, Neil Katin wrote:
For example, Text-Plus/FrameMaker format is a binary format,
is not human readable, and would most reasonably be encoded in
Binary.
There is no such format. The correct format name is almost certainly
something like Image/FrameMaker.
Just because an image contains text does not make it a text or text-plus
format.
I was going to let this conversation slide off because of diminishing
returns, but Mark's comment strikes right at my "big fear" of combining
type and subtype into one field: the arguments about where to put stuff.
Framemaker (for those who are not familiar with it) is a text processing
package, roughly akin to Microsoft Word, Interleaf, and perhaps a bit
of Slate.
Frame can write its documents out in several formats; one format is
SGML-like, is encoded using ascii, and is called Maker Interchange Format.
Another is an "internal" format that represents the same information
but is quicker to parse and more compact on disk. It is not human
readable and fits into our "binary" category with respect to transport
encoding because it does not have line length limitations.
While these two formats should have different subtypes, it seems clear
to me that they should have the same type, because they represent the
same information.
Mark has a differerent intuition.
My problem is not that we disagree, but that the types are so loosely
defined that different vendors will have to face choices like this,
and these vendors will pick different alternatives. I'm afraid of the
operational problems that this will lead to.
Oh, well, I guess I've flamed enough for today.
Neil