----- Original Message -----
From: "Julian Reschke" <julian(_dot_)reschke(_at_)gmx(_dot_)de>
To: "Yaakov Stein" <yaakov_s(_at_)rad(_dot_)com>
Cc: "John C Klensin" <john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com>; "ietf"
<ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org>
Sent: Monday, November 28, 2011 6:07 PM
On 2011-11-26 21:52, Yaakov Stein wrote:
That leaves ASCII, a few forms of PDF, and RFC 5198-conforming UTF-8.
That wouldn't bother me much, but be careful what you wish form.
What we have been told is that the rationale behind the use of ASCII and
several other formats
is that they will remain readable on devices that will be used X years
hence.
ASCII is already unreadable on many popular devices
and in a few years will be no better than old versions of word.
...
Can we *please* distinguish between the character encoding we use
(US-ASCII) and the file format (text/plain)?
If *we* don't get this right, how can we expect anybody else to get it
right?
You will be aware of the recent threads on apps-discuss about MIME types (of
which the text/plain you mention is one) which concluded, AFAICS, that there is
no rationale why a (top level) type should or should not exist, there are no
criteria for creating new ones, that it is impossible to draw up a taxonomy of
types because there is no underlying logic in any dimension.
If this were not true, then I believe that something such as text/plain would
indeed be the basis of our discussion here, we would be saying that xxx/yy is
acceptable for presentations or our mailing lists whilst mmmm/...x is not; but
we aren't, which to me points to a lack of success of that particular piece of
technology.
Tom Petch
Best regards, Julian
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