Excerpts from direct: 10-Mar-98 Re: overdefining text/plain? Ned
Freed(_at_)innosoft(_dot_)com (3167*)
What I do think we have is evidence of something we've known from the start,
which is "developers often implement things incorrectly and once implemented,
things tend not to get fixed, even when users complain".
Sure, a well-known problem. My point is that the RFC is broken, and
that a conforming MUA would not be a good one, from a CHI perspective.
I also believe that text/html is actually legal and registered. The others
aren't, but they are also fairly rare.
Hmmm. They're (text/rtf and text/sgml) both in the IANA registry at
http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/text/, along
with things like vnd.abc (a language for exchanging ``human-readable
notation for musical scores''), but I've been mistaken about media types
before. Is there some other stamp of validation that's required?
We have only ourselves to blame if it is a botch.
Fine. I'd still adjust the RFC to eliminate the requirement to display
things simply because someone has registered them as a text subtype.
Bill