ietf-822
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Re: Content-Type: text/paragraph. An alternative proposal

1998-02-18 11:06:57
On Wed, 18 Feb 1998, Ian Bell wrote:
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. 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.

Sigh.  I was hoping I didn't have to deal with this head-on as it's an MUA 
convention and not part of the media type.  How about adding the
following section:

---
4.1. Requirements for Use of text/paragraph in Internet Mail

Mail User Agents SHOULD generate text/plain instead of text/paragraph in
Internet mail.  Gateways from systems which use text/paragraph to
Internet mail SHOULD convert to text/plain and MUST NOT label 
paragraph-based text as text/plain.

A common convention in Internet messages is to indicate quoted text by
preceeding each line with a quote character of the user's choice. 
However, because it is necessary to line-wrap text/paragraph on display a
more precise convention is necessary in text/paragraph.  When quoted text
is included in text/paragraph, the paragraph is preceeded with a ">". 
When displaying text/paragraph or converting it to text/plain, agents
supporting this convention will copy all ">"s at the beginning of a
paragraph to the beginning of each line-wrapped line of that paragraph. 
---

                - Chris