Excerpts from internet.ietf-822: 14-Nov-91 Re: /alternative and the im..
Einar Stefferud(_at_)nma (586)
Hi John -- I agree with your revised observations, and certainly agree
that the growing tendancy to ship postscript drafts for review and
comment is an insidious attack on my ability to respond or to comment.
Espeacilly when the postscript document contains nothing more than
ordinary text, with some special fonts, like *italics* and BOLD.
Actually, I read this as another argument in favor of the /alternative
construct, though it also suggests a somewhat more liberal range of
implementations. Why not ship around such drafts as
multipart/alternative documents, with the first part being "pretty"
PostScript and the second being editable text? You'd then have both
types available for the two different uses. This suggests, however, a
slight liberalizing of the documented constraints on what a UA is
supposed to DO with multipart/alternative, so that UA's might offer
users the choice of versions instead of just showing the first
recognized version, but I could certainly live with that.... After
all, if it's useful people will do it anyway! -- Nathaniel