I think the draft must be changed in this area: perhaps to deprecate the
use of quote characters within text/paragraph, or maybe to say that MUAs
SHOULD downgrade to text/plain before quoting.
That would work for all the quoted material, I suppose, but we would
be back to the same problem we have today with MUAs that use QP for
the long lines of the original (non-quoted) replies.
I think we can still have quoted text with text/paragraph. Only the
beginning of a paragraph will have the quoting character which is
replicated for each (wrapped) line of the paragraph. Perhaps
text/paragraph could indicate that ">", ":", (and maybe a few
others?) should be handled similarly as quoting characters and
should be replicated on every line?
(I was also thinking that perhaps including ';quote-string=">"' after
the content-type might allow different quote strings, but it is
possible for multiply-quoted text to be taken apart for quoting
individual authors, leaving their funky quote characters at the
beginning of lines. Maybe a list of quote strings from each reply,
sortof like References: headers? Then any line beginning with any
of the quote strings could be handled like ">" by the line wrapping
code in the MUA that supports text/paragraph?)
As for splitting a paragraph which has been wrapped, this can be
acheived by the MUA having the new paragraph start with the same quote
character. Netscape 4's mailer already seems to do this (if you have
checked "by default, send HTML messages" in Edit | Preferences |
Mail & Groups | Messages), but the reply text/plain, of course.
For example, if you receive:
Content-Type: text/paragraph
>Hi. I was hoping you were interested in the fantastic =
opportunity to make money fast. Yes, unlike all the other =
scams on the net, this one is real. Why? Because you can =
trust me. Really! <wink>.
You might want to quote the first sentence. The MUA would have to
generate another quote character for the paragraph you broke in two
pieces. It would send back something like this:
Content-Type: text/paragraph
>Hi. I was hoping you were interested in the fantastic =
opportunity to make money fast.
Um, no, I don't think so. But thanks very much. I don't =
receive enough of these offers every day.
>Yes, unlike all the other =
scams on the net, this one is real. Why? Because you can =
trust me. Really! <wink>.
then, that recipient makes another reply:
Content-Type: text/paragraph
>>Hi. I was hoping you were interested in the fantastic =
opportunity to make money fast.
>Um, no, I don't think so. But thanks very much. I don't =
receive enough of these offers every day.
What do you mean? I spent lots of money on this mailing =
list, and found a mail relay I could use (you don't know how =
difficult that is now!). How can you not be interested?
>>Yes, unlike all the other =
scams on the net, this one is real. Why? Because you can =
trust me. Really! <wink>.
Maybe even to deprecate
text/paragraph itself and make it clear that the RFC (to be) only exists
to deal with the current practice of misusing qp and text/plain.
I don't think we're going to eliminate the misuse of text/plain --
variable-width characters, and people that full-screen their mailers
on huge monitors cause people to want to see really long lines and
use up all that real estate.
-Dan Wing