On Mon, 16 Feb 1998, Chris Newman <Chris(_dot_)Newman(_at_)innosoft(_dot_)com>
writes
The fundamental premise behind the current text/paragraph proposal is that
we can't stop vendors from generating this stuff, so let's at least
attempt to get them to label it so the recipient can fix it without
breaking other things.
If the only use of text/paragraph will be to allow misusers of
text/plain to correctly label their stuff, then the current proposal is
fine...
...however, I am still worried about the effects on message-quoting if
it gets wider use. It will be all too easy for quoted sections to become
badly wrapped in long conversation threads leading to users complaining
about being mis-quoted. Perhaps an explicit warning to MUAs preparing
reply messages is needed.
Your counter-proposal is based on the premise that the vendors who are
generating this stuff are willing to add code to make it palatable to
Internet users.
The premise was that if text/paragraph were going to be defined, it
would be worth defining it in such a way that it has wider applicability
than just stopping the misuse of text/plain.
Defining it to be so backwards-compatible that it would be suitable to
be sent to non-MIME recipients seemed to be worth the attempt since many
messages are prepared for a "mixed audience" of MIME and non-MIME users
(eg mailing lists, UseNet,...).
there is an existing text media type which encodes
paragraph semantics in a human friendly way (RFC 1896),
text/enriched leaves too many footprints for mixed audiences; in
particular quoted text has to be double-spaced or visible commands have
to be added.
However...
On Mon, 16 Feb 1998, Ned Freed <Ned(_dot_)Freed(_at_)innosoft(_dot_)com> writes
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.
...I take the point that defining (yet) another text type will probably
not succeed (although I thought that its suitability for non-MIME
recipients could interest vendors who support both news and mail).
--
Ian Bell T U R N P I K E Ltd