- From: Thomas Broyer <t.broyer@gmail.com>
- Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2008 17:47:11 +0100
- To: public-html@w3.org
On Feb 7, 2008 5:36 PM, Anne van Kesteren wrote: > > On Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:18:51 +0100, Julian Reschke wrote: > > Smylers wrote: > >> That mail points out that none of the characters are > 127, which is > >> correct. However, test 16 does contain several characters < 32 (and > >> which aren't tabs or line-breaks); these are not normally considered to > >> be plain text. > > > > By whom? Is there any spec that disallows them in text types? >From RFC 2046: Note that the control characters including DEL (0-31, 127) have no defined meaning in apart from the combination CRLF (US-ASCII values 13 and 10) indicating a new line. Two of the characters have de facto meanings in wide use: FF (12) often means "start subsequent text on the beginning of a new page"; and TAB or HT (9) often (though not always) means "move the cursor to the next available column after the current position where the column number is a multiple of 8 (counting the first column as column 0)." Aside from these conventions, any use of the control characters or DEL in a body must either occur (1) because a subtype of text other than "plain" specifically assigns some additional meaning, or (2) within the context of a private agreement between the sender and recipient. Such private agreements are discouraged and should be replaced by the other capabilities of this document. My understanding is that text/plain doesn't assign additional meanings to control characters, and neither we're in the second case of a private agreement; therefore control characters *must not* (should not?) be used in text/plain on the Web. > There's a spec that suggests they don't have defined meaning: > > http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2046 > > (Ironically their server is misconfigured to serve that as text/html so > you'd have to view source...) I know you deliberately chosed this misconfigured URL, but for others: append .txt to it and you'll get text/plain ;-) http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2046.txt -- Thomas Broyer
Received on Thursday, 7 February 2008 16:54:09 UTC