This definition of text/paragraph is also unlikely to be taken up by the
software vendor mainly responsible for misusing text/plain in the
messages that we see. At least one of its offerings treats unknown sub-
types of text as application/octet-stream and so they will be unable to
upgrade to text/paragraph without seriously breaking their installed
base.
How do you know this? Content-Type: text/paragraph is still only
a proposal. When it becomes a proposed standard, I am sure implementors
will begin supporting it.
Yes, support in the sense of labelling material of this sort properly would be
great.
I think the proposal in draft-newman-mime-textpara-00.txt is better
than your proposal. It does not require any modification of the text
itself, only better labelling of it, this must be simpler to implement.
Your proposal will make it difficult to intentionally send text with
spaces before line breaks, even if this may not be very meaningful,
it does not seem nice to restrict users from sending any text they
want!
Agreed.
More generally, what we're doing here isn't defining a new form of text. (If we
were I would certainly be willing to consider alternative formats.) No, what
we're doing is providing a label for widespread existing practice -- practice
for which no MIME label presently exists.
We have substantial experience that says we cannot define new textual media
types and expect widepspread deployment. Both text/richtext, text/enriched, and
even text/html (in the context of email) have tried to do this and have not
succeeded.
However, we also have substantial implementation experience that says people
_are_ willing to add a label to the text they generate. Specifically, we've
seen wide deployment of "Content-type: text/plain; charset=whatever" labels on
the Internet.
Text/paragraph is, after all, a widely used "native" text format on quite a
platforms. It is entirely reasonable to expect it to "leak out" into email on a
regular basis.
Now, nobody is claiming for a minute that text/paragraph is a great format that
should be used in preference to, say, text/enriched or text/html. It isn't.
However, many of us, myself included, have battled against the ongoing use of
text/paragraph, to no avail. So, given that we have to live with it, at least
let's try to get it labelled so we can handle it intelligently.
Ned