At 4:50 PM -0800 10/30/98, Ashley Yakeley wrote:
I maintain that you're holding a far higher standard of readability than
that implied by RFC 2046.
At this point the issue is probably whether clients will do what you want
with it. Text/paragraph is much preferred to to format=flowed (I think) for
semantic purity, but the mail clients don't what we want with it.
To me the top level types are very rough groupings based on some common
default treatment we want applied to them. For example multipart/xxx
defaults to multipart/mixed, a rule that's widely implemented correctly.
Text/xxx was supposed to default to text/plain, but since the registration
of text/html (very unreadable to humans) most MUAs have stopped display
text/xxxx by default.
I guess for text/* the rules these days amount to this:
1) Does it look OK when splatted directly to the screen of a VT100
2) Are you willing to let it occasionally be treated like an attachment by
mal-conforming MUAs.
and
3) If you don't like 2 and want to use a parameter, can you convince the
standards folks that your type is OK to be identified just by a parameter
to text/plain.
LL