Re: LYNX-DEV Mime type support.

[Klaus Weide]

On Tue, 29 Apr 1997, Michael Warner wrote:

> Perhaps news rather than mail?  Brad Templeton, for instance, has been
> pushing for some sort of 'html-like' mark-up, in some very minimal
> format, perhaps included as part of the headers.  In theory, it would
> be invisible to readers that don't use it.  

I read some of the documents about that "invisible" markup hiding
within plain text a while ago.  Essentially, formatting tags are encoded
as sequences of SPACE and TAB chars at the end of text lines.  It is an
interesting idea, but is it anything more?  The only source of such texts
would probably be Templeton's clari.net service, and even they use
(some kind of) text/html now.  (I think so.  I don't have access to
a clari.net newsfeed.)

Anyway, there isn't a MIME type in place to signal to a reader that a text
is encoded in that way.  And the idea is anyway that it should be readable
nicely to text/plain viewers, and Lynx already shows text/plain just fine :)

Parsing text/enriched (a different thing) probably isn't difficult, it is
a HTML-tag-like format.  Parsing it could be implemented as a much-reduced 
subset of the existing SGML parser (yet another "New DTD" :) ), except
for a different meaning of empty lines.  Probably could just reuse the
existing code in HTML.c (or the needed small subset) for the tags which
text/enriched uses.  So anybody who wants a small project to familiarize
himself or herself with Lynx internal could take this on.

> The idea generated vast
> quantities of heat, and maybe even a little light, on
> news.software.readers a few months ago.

Wasn't that more about distributing text/html news?

  Klaus

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