At 1998-10-19 14:43, Randall Gellens wrote:
Running code is a good way to test theory.
In my opinion, you can't even write this kind of code until you know
exactly (i.e. formally) what it's supposed to do -- specifically, what
every given sequence of octets means.
The text/paragraph form
turned out not to interoperate, while format=flowed does.
But I'm right, aren't I? Text/paragraph fails to be handled correctly by
many existing UAs which don't like unrecognised text/*, but it's still
useful for many applications. I think there's room in the world for it no
matter what solutions anyone comes up with for mail and news.
The root of my argument is that MIME is no longer just for the Internet
Mail of its acronym: it's becoming a general data-typing scheme. I don't
think proposed MIME types should be rejected just because they confuse
some existing mail UAs -- the obvious example here is text/html, which
can annoy mail recipients but works well over HTTP.
Now that may be off-topic on a list for extensions to RFC 822, but that
just happens to be the place where draft-newman-mime-textpara is (or was)
being evaluated. And it may not be a good extension to RFC 822 but it
would be very useful for other applications. In fact, the format it
describes is already being used very widely, and all it needs is a
suitable MIME content-type header. Come to think of it, it's even being
used by many mail UAs together with quoted-printable, but being labelled
'text/plain'.
--
Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA