ietf-822
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Re: HTML in MIME mail

1994-11-21 11:48:57
At 4:28 PM 11/20/94, Nathaniel Borenstein wrote:

...the ability to establish hot links to other parts of an
enclosing MIME entity.  This could be accomplished by an extention to
the URL syntax that allowed reference to the other parts.

HTML documents already can refer to other parts of the same document.  I
don't know the details of the syntax, but I do know it is possible.

I'm not sure what to make of Steve's suggestion of a metric for assessing
content vs. markup.  It seems to me this would be useful for determining
whether or not the proper content-type is application or text.  But I think
that is an unnecessary complication.  Harald, what systems are depending on
application/html?

I think Ed is focusing on a critical issue:

At 11:19 AM 11/18/94, Ed Levinson wrote:

The standard for text/NOTplain should be, "Do we ask vendors to
implement it *inside* their user agents?".  Under that standard any
text/NOTplain subtype must be a standards track RFC.  That will
include requiring base and interoperable implemenations.  It will
insure that a time will come when the large portion of the installed
base will be able to handle it "out of the box".  It also insures that
the IETF community is aligned.

There were two reasons we adopted enriched text:

1) We couldn't avoid arguing about the virtues of  <markup language #1> vs
<markup language #2>.  And that was getting us nowhere.

2) Regardless of the details of the different languages, we felt we needed
something rich enough to be useful, but simple enough to insure enough
implementors would adopt it.

So now we have HTML.  Is that simple enough?  It certainly has gained
widespread use.  It appears to be rich enough.

Pete (Resnick) and I talked a little about this.  I expect he'll have
something to say after he's eaten his fill of Thanksgiving (It's time for
that US holiday devoted to excess consumption of food and football -- well,
actually, any winter holiday has become an excuse for excess football, it
seems).


john noerenberg
jwn2(_at_)qualcomm(_dot_)com
noerenberg.j (Applelink)
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Don't it always seem to go,
That you don't know what you got til it's gone
Joni Mitchell, "Big Yellow Taxi", 1969
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