- From: Murray Altheim <murray.altheim@nttc.edu>
- Date: Fri, 7 Jul 1995 17:57:07 -0400
- To: www-html@www10.w3.org
- Cc: dsr@lns598.lns.cornell.edu
Dan Riley (dsr@lns598.lns.cornell.edu) wrote: >murray.altheim@nttc.edu (Murray Altheim) writes: >> Thorvaldur Gunnlaugsson (thg@althingi.is) writes: >> >There is lots of text around which could be made accessible >> >on the web but nobody has the time to mark up. >> >Frequently the only structure this text has is tabs and >> >formfeeds. HTML should support formfeeds in <PLAINTEXT> >> >so this little structure there is present in this text >> >does not get lost on the web. >> >> Unfortunately, PLAINTEXT is deprecated in HTML 2.0 and beyond, so you would >> be forced to put the entire document into a number of PRE elements. > >Maybe I'm missing something here--if the documents aren't HTML, why >try to serve them as Content-Type: text/html? Plain text, it seems >to me, ought to be served as Content-Type: text/plain -- that is what >it is there for, and presumably that is why PLAINTEXT is deprecated. >RFC 1521 is a little wishy-washy on formfeeds and tabs, at least for >character set US-ASCII: [description in RFC...] You're not missing anything. I was only suggesting translation into HTML as a method of creating breaks between sections or pages, as Thorvaldur had requested. >My reading of this is that a web browser ought to handle FF and TAB in >text/plain in the traditional fashion. I don't know of any browsers >that will page text/plain on formfeeds, but that is a quality of >implementation issue that should be taken up with the browser authors, >not an HTML issue. As you point out, web browsers ought to handle text/plain with all of its allowed controls properly. I've just never seen a browser that does. I agree that formfeeds in text/plain is a browser issue, not one of HTML. Perhaps you have pointed us to the solution of our discussion: directing that features of non-HTML specific MIME types be implemented more thoroughly by browser authors. Murray __________________________________________________________________ Murray M. Altheim, Information Systems Analyst National Technology Transfer Center, Wheeling, West Virginia email: murray.altheim@nttc.edu www: http://ogopogo.nttc.edu/people/maltheim/maltheim.html
Received on Friday, 7 July 1995 17:57:36 UTC