ietf-822
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Re: Text/Enhanced straw man

1993-02-16 19:19:34
I imagine that GNU Emacs mail mode, for instance, would by default
attach MIME headers to send a message as ``text/simplemail'', rather
than the user having to say so explicitly.  A standard mode toggle
(Control-C something) would allow the user to toggle to ``text/plain''

 Please do not mark a message as being more complicated than it is (ie
 as simplemail when it really is plain). I think we should follow the
 spirit of the RFC here. In the discussion about charsets rfc1341
 mentions that the "lowest common denominator" should be used, I feel
 that the same rule should apply here. That is so that my MUA can display
 the message with my fast and efficent pager (more or less:-) instead
 of the slow simpletext viewer which hasn't nearly as many features.

I'm not sure whether or not I agree here.  With text/simplemail or
text/enhanced, even if no special formatting is called for, what you
have are essentially text/plain messages that adhere to a set of rules
such that an MUA that knows the formats can make assumptions about,
for instance, where it can fold lines and what constitutes quoting.
It would also change the behavior of a composing agent when quoting
the message.  No such assumptions would be possible in the general
(text/plain) case.

For these reasons, I'd say that if you are planning on following the
guidelines (which basically just ammount to

        -o putting blank lines between paragraphs,

        -o not depending on unfilled lines,

        -o using a restricted set of quote characters, and

        -o watching out for certain markup sequences),

the article should be marked as text/enhanced.  Since the design will
be such that it is displayable as straight text, and since the default
MUA behavior for unknown subtypes of TEXT will doubtless be to display
as straight text, I don't see that it buys you anything to try to push
people to use text/plain unless markup is actually used.

As for your (more or less) fast and efficient pager, it should be
pretty simple (and I'm going to when I get a free minute) to write a
program that takes text/enhanced and spits out formatted text with
man-style markup that both more and less understand.

Evan Kirshenbaum                       +------------------------------------
    HP Laboratories                    | It is a popular delusion that the
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to waste this
    (415)857-7572                      | much money
                                       |                   P.J. O'Rourke

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