Re: audio, checksums, and trojan horses

> I think we're agreeing verbosely.
Yup, you're right.

> Just saying "TeX" is not as much of a
> specification as just saying "Postscript" is, because of the
> configuration possibilities with TeX.  It may be necessary to define
> standard configurations, and transmit TeX documents as sets of files,
> and so forth, while Postscript is much more straightforward.
TeX also requires complete processing of the entire document before you can
view any of it. I suppose this requirement could be relaxed, but quite a bit
of hacking would be needed. There was a project at Standard (the VORTeX
project, I believe) to do this, but I don't know if they ever got anywhere.

> I think
> the major reason TeX is viewed as less of an "automatic display"
> language is because these conventions are not nailed down.  If some set
> of them were, and were used in mail, I think that TeX would make as much
> sense as Postscript.
Agreed. I don't see activity in the TeX community to do this, but I may have
missed it since I don't pay that much attention to everything that's going on 
there. I'll ask our local TeX guru and see what the future holds (he goes to
all the conferences). This will have the side-effect of telling us whether or 
not we need to start thinking about the specification of attributes that 
identify what sort of TeX document a given message is (in particular, it would 
be nice to know the format: TeX (plain), LaTeX (lplain), SLITeX (splain), 
etc.), which we don't need if TeX is going to grow some document structuring
conventions like what PostScript has.

This is not RFC-XXXX material, in my opinion, but a followon is definitely
needed if we remove TeX from RFC-XXXX.

                                Ned