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Re: Comments on MIME/SGML

1994-03-09 09:17:00
Jim Conklin writes (on text/sgml vs application/sgml)...

Representing (I believe) lots of relatively unsophisticated users, I'd like
to push for keeping text reserved for only the very simple things, please.

The other thing that top-level types are used for is gateways that have to do
translation.  text/* types will probably be translated for readability by
humans instead of by machines -- so the charset might be translated even if it
involves some loss of information, and a content-transfer-encoding of 8bit
might be converted to quoted-printable instead of base64, even though the
latter encoding is probably "safer".   The goal is to make it readable
according to the conventions for "text" in the destination environment.

Body parts of type application/*, on the other hand, probably aren't useful
unless you (a) have the right application and (b) have all of the bits intact.
So gateways are more likely to preserve such information for these types,
rather than translate it to something.

I believe the latter behavior is more likely to be appropriate for SGML
documents.

Keith

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