On Tue, 18 Aug 1998, Keith Moore wrote:
I don't understand why we need yet another tweak to handle the
special case of text without line breaks. Why not just use
"recipient friendly HTML" for such cases? Especially since
it's already supported (for reading, anyway) by most user agents.
The issue has nothing to do with markup languages. The issue is to fix an
interoperability problem with text/plain as follows:
(A) some text/plain is generated to be displayed in fixed-width with hard
line breaks. This is used for tables. In fact, I get my monthly
long-distance phone bill by email in this format (160 columns).
(B) some text/plain is generated in paragraph form with the intent that it
will be wrapped by the recipient.
(C) Wrapping (A) will break it severely -- it really needs to be displayed
fixed width with a horizontal scroll bar if necessary.
(D) Displaying (B) without wrapping will break it -- if it's displayed
with a horizontal scroll bar, it is largely unreadable.
(E) There is no way to distinguish (A) from (B) at the recipient end,
except with heuristics or a manual client option.
We can deploy 100 different uses of markup languages and it won't change
this problem.
There are only two ways to solve this problem -- create a label to
distinguish (A) from (B), or create a way to encode the functionality of
(B) such that it is 100% compatible with (A). I proposed the former with
text/paragraph and Randy has proposed the latter.
It may be the case that it's just too late to fix the problem and we'll
all have to live with it. But we should at least seriously evaluate the
proposals.
- Chris
P.S. There is significant evidence that it's too hard to make SGML-based
markup recipient friendly.