ietf-822
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Re: draft-gellens-format-00

1998-08-18 08:44:17
On Tue, 18 Aug 1998, Valdis(_dot_)Kletnieks(_at_)vt(_dot_)edu writes
On Tue, 18 Aug 1998 10:18:22 BST, you said:
I don't see how that poses a problem at all - it is entirely a matter
for the user. If they want to send preformatted material, they will have
to send unflowed text (presuming all MUAs give a choice between flowed
and unflowed text).

That's a very big presumption. I'm still stumbling once in a while
across old MUAs that don't understand that unknown multipart/frobozz
should be treated as /mixed, or can't get quoted-printable right (most
often, quoting but leaving the CTE blank).


Sorry, I actually meant "(presuming that all MUAs that implement the
new standard for flowed text give a choice between flowed and unflowed
text)" - a very different presumption! I think my point is still valid
(but I'm no longer so sure!).

However, if this sort of quoting problem is not considered important, I
would much rather see the original idea of text/paragraph or

Personally, I call it more than "important".  I consider *any*
proposal that doesn't allow for sane quoting/attribution as being
terminally broken on the show-stopper level.

Yes, I know currently quoting/citing is a mess.  However, this is in
the category of legacy systems.  Any *new* proposal has to do better
and not present new challenges to the authors of MUAs.


Which is absolutely where I stand. When discussing text/paragraph
months back, I said:

The more I think about this, the more I worry about the interaction
between text/paragraph and message-quoting. I fear we may be moving from a
standard (text/plain) that's being broken to a standard (text/paragraph)
that _is_ broken.

-- 
Ian Bell                                           T U R N P I K E  Ltd