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

On Wed, 18 Feb 1998 11:41:48 CST, Rick Troth said:
> On Wed, 18 Feb 1998, Ian Bell wrote:
> > The conclusion must be that using _any_ quote character when replying in
> > text/paragraph may cause damage to the ensuing conversation thread. The
> > problem does not lie in MUAs but in text/paragraph itself.
>       This connection I do NOT see. 
The problem is that although (for example), the above got quoted using
the pseudo-standard '>' character, there's no good way to flag what
*was* actually used.  For instance, there's MUA's out there that will
generate something based on the quoted user's name - so one of the
lines above *could* have started out like this:

Rick: Ian> problem does not lie.....

Mix this with the commonly used tactic of inserting your commentary
between the displayed lines of a paragraph, and you're headed for
a near-guaranteed mess.  Especially when considering that a large
part of the user base has MUAs that will punt text/paragraph back
to text/plain.... 

For the curious, almost the exact same problem in another guise
crops up with the question of replying-with-commentary to a
multipart/signed.  This mail is PGP-signed - but if you reply to it
and add commentary, it invalidates my signature on the text.  So
although I can prove what-I-said for *THIS* note, I can't pass that
on to OTHER follow-up notes where I could be edited/misquoted/etc...





-- 
                                Valdis Kletnieks
                                Computer Systems Senior Engineer
                                Virginia Tech

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