On Mon, 17 May 2010, comex wrote: > Gratuitous: Almost all email clients support this format; the archive, > which does not, is not mentioned in the ruleset. True, it is encoded > as a body of text, but bodies of text are encoded as series of numeric > bytes, and bytes are encoded with bits, and so on... and without an > actual requirement in the ruleset that messages be plain text, I don't > see why my image is not acceptable. In fact, I'd say that I have the > R101 right to post any type of content I want to the fora, within > reasonable limits such as size.
My terminal-window based client (yes I still use Pine!) does not directly support such images; while it is trivial to get it to a place I can look at it as png, we have a long tradition of plain-text that shouldn't be lightly discarded. In addition to format, I purposefully wanted to test how far the "attachment" idea should be pushed where the rules are silent (and some previous precedents relatively strict on what constitutes the "body" of the message. For example, what if the body of the text and an attachment (regardless of format) contains two different actions for which order matters? > FWIW, I believe that it would be represented adequately (albeit > inconveniently) if you indicated that the message should be decoded as > a PNG in the same way that the original message did, whether or not > the actual fragment is text or an image. However, your report seemed > to imply that the fragment was gibberish. Yes, I'll admit to be purposefully vague on publishing translation technology details (not required to be tracked!) versus content to question how far the very long tradition of relying on text-only should be pushed. -G.
