Date: Sun, 8 Sep 1991 14:39 PDT
From: "Ned Freed, Postmaster" <NED(_at_)hmcvax(_dot_)claremont(_dot_)edu>
Subject: Re: Character-set header (was Re: Minutes of the Atlanta 822ext
meeting)
Neil Katin writes:
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.
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.
My question, then, would be, "is it useful to display/revise Framemaker
material in its SGML-like format?". I suspect that the answer to this is "no".
This does not match PostScript, which is explicitly thought of as a revisable
document format (I don't agree, but this is what Adobe claims for PostScript,
not me). Thus, PostScript is grouped under text-plus, while Framemaker
probably
should be grouped under image.
The SGML-like version of frame (as well as the binary version) are
semantically the same -- they are both rereadable by the application
and fully modifiable. To me, this means that both formats fit
into the "text-plus" format.
Of course, this all falls back to the question of "what does the text-plus
category really encompass". There is clealy not a wide spread understanding
of the low-level meaning. By low level, I mean "given a format X, is it
of type text-plus? Image? Binary?" We've heard three different opinions
about what it will be.
Is it just me, or is anyone else there worried about the day-to-day
operational problems of these type (class?) names? At the very least
we need to tighten up the definitions, and point out that binary is
the trash-can category for anything that didn't fit anywhere else.
Neil