Re: A truly multilingual WWW

At  9:51 AM 12/28/94 -0500, Gavin Nicol wrote:
>Albert Lunde writes:
>>Of course text/html is not the only text/* type we might have to
>>transport....
>
>Surely most parsers for other textual data types need not grovel
>around at the data storage format level? Most can surely be abstracted
>enough that they can deal with a character as an atom of information
>rather than as a sequence of bytes?

This is a reasonable assumption, I'm not sure if it is a safe assumption.

SGML seems to take a more abstract view of text than an average software
package.

Though it does seem like there aren't many text/* types actually registered
so far to give us a guide as to what to expect. Some of the potential
text-like hard cases (i.e. postscript) are registered as application types.

According to the list at:

<ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/media-types>

registered text types are:

text            plain                                   [RFC1521,NSB]
                richtext                                [RFC1521,NSB]
                enriched                                    [RFC1563]
                tab-separated-values                   [Paul Lindner]


The comp.mail.mime FAQ lists unregistered text types in actual use (by some
mail software) as:

Text types:

text/html               MHonArc: WWW HTML
text/unknown            Worldtalk
text/x-html             MHonArc: WWW HTML
text/x-setext           MHonArc: setext
text/x-usenet-faq       Ohio State WWW FAQ document format


---
    Albert Lunde                      Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu