Re: RFC 2646

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk> writes:

> After pGnus is released, I think RFC 2646 support would be a good
> thing to work on.  It solves some of the worst shortcommings of
> text/plain in a backward compatible way.

(Executive summary: One encodes whether line break are "hard" or not
by using trailing whitespace.)

Yes, I think Gnus should support this if it becomes supported by any
other significant news/mail reader.

I don't think it will be, though.  It addresses one (annoying) aspect
of variable-width composition, and that's all it does, so I doubt that 
it's sexy enough to garner much enthusiasm.

> We might even invent a new format value for our _fancy_ markup.

Cursory reading of the rfc seems to say that the only valid values for
the FORMAT parameter are "fixed" and "flowed".  Adding more (sub)types
will require "fixed-and-fancy", "flowed-and-fancy", "fixed", "flowed",
and when people add more of these subformats, it'll expand
exponentially.  Which is one thing I don't like about this RFC; it
seems so... fixed.  No possibilty for future feepurism.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen