[pmmail-list] text/plain email

Fri, 09 Aug 2002 10:58:20 +1200

On Thu, 08 Aug 2002 15:53:06 -0700, Tim Roberts wrote:

>On Fri, 09 Aug 2002 10:18:51 +1200, Richard Grevers wrote:
>
>>On Thu, 08 Aug 2002 15:00:07 -0700, Tim Roberts wrote:
>>
>>>Although I agree wholeheartedly that this behavior is misguided and annoying, 
>>>and violates the "principle of least astonishment", there are in fact no RFCs 
>>>that mandate the physical rendering of a piece of e-mail.  An MUA is 
>>>essentially free (from an RFC standpoint) to interpret the contents as it
>>>sees fit.
>>
>>text/plain is pretty clearly defined as "unformatted" in RFC 1521
>>http://www.nacs.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/MIME/1521/07_Predefined_Content-Type.html#
>7.1
>
>Yes, I looked it up before I sent my original response.  It says that "no 
>special software is REQUIRED to get the full meaning" (emphasis mine) of a 
>text/plain part, but it really says nothing about how it must be rendered, and 
>it fact it cannot do so.  One mailer might display it in fixed-pitch Courier, 
>while another displays it in proportional Times Roman with double-spacing.  
>That has to be allowed.  Many mailers (including PMMail) look for and highlight 
>things that look like URLs and e-mail addresses.  That's not prohibited, and 
>neither is interpreting embedded <HTML> tags.
>
>I still hate it.

Well my interpretation is that in unformatted text you cannot have any such thing as
an embedded tag. <HTML> is just a sequence of 6 units of character data in this mime type.

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