Ned Freed wrote:
I agree. And I'm sorry, but the argument that "people expect DTDs to be
displayed as text" just doesn't wash -- technical experts (who are capable
of configuring their agents to do anything they want) may expect this, but
the average user doesn't know diddly about XML or DTD and doesn't want a
bunch of incomprehensible stuff displayed on his or her screen.
Ned, since you co-authored MIME RFCs, could you please give us an explicit
criteria of text subtypes? You appear to claim that text subtypes
have to be readable by casual users. However, text/css, text/rfc822-headers,
text/vnd.in3d.3dml, text/rtf are already registered. I do not think
that they are quite readable by casual users. On the other hand, Postscript
programs are application/postscript rather than text/postscript. Is text/css
a mistake? Should XSL become application/xsl-xml rather than text/xsl-xml?
Cheers,
Makoto
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RFC 2046: defitition of the top-level media type "text"
4.1. Text Media Type
The "text" media type is intended for sending material which is
principally textual in form. A "charset" parameter may be used to
indicate the character set of the body text for "text" subtypes,
notably including the subtype "text/plain", which is a generic
subtype for plain text. Plain text does not provide for or allow
formatting commands, font attribute specifications, processing
instructions, interpretation directives, or content markup. Plain
text is seen simply as a linear sequence of characters, possibly
interrupted by line breaks or page breaks. Plain text may allow the
stacking of several characters in the same position in the text.
Plain text in scripts like Arabic and Hebrew may also include
facilitites that allow the arbitrary mixing of text segments with
opposite writing directions.
Beyond plain text, there are many formats for representing what might
be known as "rich text". An interesting characteristic of many such
representations is that they are to some extent readable even without
the software that interprets them. It is useful, then, to
distinguish them, at the highest level, from such unreadable data as
images, audio, or text represented in an unreadable form. In the
absence of appropriate interpretation software, it is reasonable to
show subtypes of "text" to the user, while it is not reasonable to do
so with most nontextual data. Such formatted textual data should be
represented using subtypes of "text".
Here is the list of currently registered subtypes of text.
text plain [RFC1521,Borenstein]
richtext [RFC1521,Borenstein]
enriched [RFC1896]
tab-separated-values [Paul Lindner]
html [RFC1866]
sgml [RFC1874]
vnd.latex-z [Lubos]
vnd.fmi.flexstor [Hurtta]
uri-list [Daniel]
vnd.abc [Allen]
rfc822-headers [RFC1892]
vnd.in3d.3dml [Powers]
prs.lines.tag [Lines]
vnd.in3d.spot [Powers]
css [RFC2318]
xml [RFC2376]
rtf [Lindner]
directory [RFC2425]
calendar [RFC2445]
vnd.wap.wml [Stark]
vnd.wap.wmlscript [Stark]
vnd.motorola.reflex [Patton]