Excerpts from direct: 10-Dec-91 Re: image/basic ? Nathaniel
Borenstein(_at_)thu (375)
Do we really want to open this particular can of worms?
I appreciate the chagrin at raising this point so late in the process,
but I really think it's an important point to pin down if we really want
to encourage multi-media mail. If we point out "text/richtext" and
"audio/basic", we may see a lot of messages flying around with formatted
text and audio, but no images!
pbm
g3fax
gif
tiff-b-netfax (which I assume is the implicit argument of the NETFAX group)
Thinking more about it, I don't like any of these four. Only gif will
support color, but gif is based on "compress" (the note from ppmtogif.c
in the pbmplus package reads in part:
* GIF Image compression - modified 'compress'
*
* Based on: compress.c - File compression ala IEEE Computer, June 1984.
*
* By Authors: Spencer W. Thomas
(decvax!harpo!utah-cs!utah-gr!thomas)
* Jim McKie (decvax!mcvax!jim)
* Steve Davies (decvax!vax135!petsd!peora!srd)
* Ken Turkowski (decvax!decwrl!turtlevax!ken)
* James A. Woods (decvax!ihnp4!ames!jaw)
* Joe Orost (decvax!vax135!petsd!joe)
I'd prefer a less restricted format. ppm, from the ppmplus package, is
a possibility -- but it has no compression. Sun's run-length-encoded
raster format is both simple and (somewhat) compact; perhaps that's the
right answer.
Bill