At 10:19 AM 11/18/94, Ed Levinson wrote:
With this view the questions become, where and how do we draw the line.
Maybe we shouldn't draw the line. Maybe we should define *both*
application/foo and text/foo.
The application one would be for any arbitrary foo file, the text one would
be for "well-behaved" foo files. "Well behaved" would mean readable
without a viewer, and perhaps also the eschewing of difficult-to-implement
or difficult-to-transport constructs. (One could even imagine [shudder]
text/postscript.)
If the real criterion is human legibility, then let's make that the ruling
criterion, not the markup language it happens to be expressed in.
The standard for text/NOTplain should be, "Do we ask vendors to
implement it *inside* their user agents?".
That seems a reasonable test, though not the only test.
And, to second John Noerenberg's comment (and no, I'm not a shill, I just
happen to agree :-)), there's a LOT of HTML on the Internet nowadays.
Perhaps using an HTML subset as our "basic" rich text format makes more
sense now than it did two years ago.
--
Steve Dorner, Qualcomm Incorporated. "Oog make mission statement."