ietf-822
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Re: image/basic ?

1991-12-10 15:56:25
Excerpts from direct: 10-Dec-91 Re: image/basic ? Nathaniel
Borenstein(_at_)thu (590)

There are two big differences between image and audio:  First, a lot
more image formats have proliferated and created entrenched user bases. 
Second, there is nothing nearly as ubiquitous as the telephony standard
for audio.

All the more reason for having something on the image front like
"text/basic" (better known as "text/richtext")!  I really don't care
which (and perhaps it's already provided for with "image/postscript"). 
Seems like we've made it fairly easy to send formatted text (by defining
"richtext") and sound (with "audio/basic") but not images; doesn't that
strike you as odd?

GIF struck me as a reasonable candidate over pbm, ppm, and g3fax for a
few reasons:  it supports both monochrome and color, it has some
built-in compression, and there's a lot of gif already all over the
Internet (which makes it seem likely that there are a lot of tools for
handling it).  But if there's some better format...  Hope there's no
need to invent another artificial format, just to get around NIH.

Bill


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