RFC - 2646

The Text/Plain Format Parameter

Original:	ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2646.txt
Authors:	R. Gellens [Qualcomm]
Date:	August 1999
Category:	Informational
This specification has been !!! obsoleted !!!

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Obsoleted by:
RFC-3676prop	The Text/Plain Format and DelSp Parameters

Updates:
RFC-2046draft	Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part Two: Media Types (Updated by RFC-3798draft, RFC-2646)

Referred by:	11 RFC
Refers to:	7 RFC

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Status

This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1999). All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

Interoperability problems have been observed with erroneous labelling of paragraph text as Text/Plain, and with various forms of "embarrassing line wrap." (See section 3.)

Attempts to deploy new media types, such as Text/Enriched [RICH] and Text/HTML [HTML] have suffered from a lack of backwards compatibility and an often hostile user reaction at the receiving end.

What is required is a format which is in all significant ways Text/Plain, and therefore is quite suitable for display as Text/Plain, and yet allows the sender to express to the receiver which lines can be considered a logical paragraph, and thus flowed (wrapped and joined) as appropriate.

This memo proposes a new parameter to be used with Text/Plain, and, in the presence of this parameter, the use of trailing whitespace to indicate flowed lines. This results in an encoding which appears as normal Text/Plain in older implementations, since it is in fact normal Text/Plain.

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