ietf-822
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Re: overdefining text/plain?

1998-03-11 13:21:57
Excerpts from direct: 10-Mar-98 Re: overdefining text/plain? Ned
Freed(_at_)innosoft(_dot_)com (965*)

And as I said before, I disagree with this assessment. I also think you have
not come even close to demonstrating that this is a good change to make.

Well, maybe I'm suggesting the wrong change.

Ned, perhaps you could comment on whether you feel text/rtf and
text/vnd.in3d.3dml are (1) actual valid registered subtypes of "text"
(maybe they're not and I'm just confused by their presence in
http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/text/), and (2)
ignoring for the moment what the RFC specifies, whether it is good
user-interface design to display values of these types as "text/plain",
charset "US-ASCII".  In my opinion, the answers are "yes", and "no",
which in my mind points to a deficiency in the system somewhere.

The problem seems to be in the semantics of "text".  My (fallible)
understanding of the desired semantics is that all subtypes of text are
more-or-less directly presentable to the user; that is, they are all
more or less plain-text, and additional markup or other information that
can't be interpreted by the MUA can either be understood by the user as
text, or is not a significant enough part of the information so that if
discarded, the message will be misunderstood.  The actual semantics in
use, however, seems to be that any data which is represented in a
textual format, regardless of whether that representation was meant for
humans or machines, is a subtype of "text".

Bill

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