On Fri, 13 Mar 1998, Pete Resnick wrote:
I don't understand how this differs in kind from a wrap=yes parameter to
text/plain. Why is that acceptable and this not?
Because Content-Disposition includes display/storage advice while
Content-Type is used to distinguish semanticly different media types. The
meaning of CRLF is semantically different between paragraph-based and
line-based plain text, so the distinction has to be made on the
Content-Type line. I don't see a problem calling these either two
different subtypes of "text" or two different variants of "text/plain,"
but I do see a problem calling them the exact same media type with
different display advice.
For another fun example, suppose you're mapping from text/plain to a
Unicode text file using the LINE SEPARATOR and PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR
codepoints -- then the mappings for line-based and paragraph-based text
are different. (Please don't start a long diversion on this example --
it's a separate problem).
I'm starting to think "wrap=yes/no" is a misleading name for the
parameter. Perhaps "format=fixed-lines/paragraphs" would be better.
Anyone have a better suggestion? (and please don't suggest
"blurdybloop=yes/no" :-).
At this point, I'll go ahead and update the draft to use a content-type
parameter ("format=" for now).
BTW, as far as the spec is concerned, "format=fixed-lines" and no format
parameter are semanticly identical. If an MUA wants to handle those two
cases differently, that's fine.
- Chris