On Tue, 18 Oct 1994, John Gardiner Myers wrote:
david_goldsmith(_at_)taligent(_dot_)com (David Goldsmith) writes:
In the context of MIME, why is it necessary to specify the line separator
sequence at all?
There are cases where MIME readers and gateways need to know the line
separator sequence of a text/plain object, but won't necessarily know
about all the possible character sets. Minimally conformant readers,
for example, need to be able to save such objects to files, converting
the line separator sequence to the local newline convention.
Bingo! And this makes EBCDIC users happy too, David:
"plain text" on CMS would be records of EBCDIC with end-of-record
interpolated at the 0D 0A pairs. Given the widely used one-for-one
translation (ask me for the table if you don't have it or can't
generate it) it doesn't as much matter what the character set is.
You can go back and forth between ASCII (with 0D 0A in-band record
delimiter) and EBCDIC (with out-of-band record delimiter) any number
of times and still get the same "plain text".
There are a couple of other points about "plain text" that I
wish I could get everyone to embrace, but this will do for now. ;-)
--
_.John G. Myers Internet: jgm+(_at_)CMU(_dot_)EDU
LoseNet: ...!seismo!ihnp4!wiscvm.wisc.edu!give!up
--
Rick Troth <troth(_at_)rice(_dot_)edu>, Rice University, Information Systems
" ... but when they measure themselves by themselves, and compare
themselves with themselves, they are without understanding."