----- Original Message ----- From: "Julian Reschke" <julian.reschke@xxxxxx> To: "Yaakov Stein" <yaakov_s@xxxxxxx> Cc: "John C Klensin" <john-ietf@xxxxxxx>; "ietf" <ietf@xxxxxxxx> 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 _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf