Greg,
A few quibbles (I might have more when I have time to study this)...
Even binary application files may be
viewed on a text only display if they are word processor files.
I question this assertion, since they might, in principle, contain
formatting codes that would "blow up" a text-oriented display.
printable with TEXT in Cyrillic, Greek, or Arabic 8859 and Base 64
and mostly obeying the line length conventions.
Is "mostly obeying" close to "partially pregnant"? Many of these word
processors don't use line breaks except at paragraph boundaries, and may
have odd conventions for those line breaks.
MESSAGE: Implies nothing about the display. Contains a fully formated
822 conformant message which may contain any combination of
other content-types.
This feels a little contradictory. A "fully formatted 822 [fully]
conformant message" is ASCII, which implies a lot about the display.
AUDIO:...
(I do not see phonetic synthizer input in this category, but
rather in Application)
I don't understand what you are suggesting here. I just called one of
my text-to-speech colleagues and, if that is what you mean by "phonetic
synthizer (sic) input", she says there are only three useful
representations:
(1) text, as we would normally understand it.
(2) International Phonetic Alphabet notation/representation, possibly
accompanied by some additional stress and rare information. This, too,
is text, albeit in a non-ASCII character set that we haven't talked
about much.
(3) The sounds, which are "audio", by any reasonable definition.
VIDEO: Required a bit-mapped display and a lot of disk space and a
lot of CPU and maybe even signal processing hardware. It
implies nothing about being revisble.
You mean a lot of CPU like my $50 TV set? We haven't said anything
yet about prohibiting coded or sampled analog video, and, while it
requires lots of bandwidth, it is real cheap to display.
I'm quite uncertain about your binary/application distinction and don't
think it holds up in practice. One could, for example, argue that
machine code is as much decompiler fodder as source codes (which we
would presumably identify as "text-plus", right?) are compiler-fodder.
john