Re: FW: text/enriched sucks (was RE: Java not Fault-tolerant)

Rohit Khare (khare@w3.org)
Wed, 2 Apr 1997 14:42:48 -0500 (EST)


DanK wrote:

> What mailer are you using? text/enriched never took off as a standard
> and is now universally considered dead because of the (now) obvious
> use of MIME encapsulation of HTML (RFC 2110). Of course, the cool way
> to use MHTML is to encapsulate it in multipart/alternative after a
> text/plain body part so that any RFC 2049-conformant mailer will
> display the best format.

But "the cool way" uses 2X bits (which is great if you're selling
broadband access... :-). One rumored technology solution (NOT from
W3C) is "invisible HTML" which *looks* like text/plain, but hides the
HTML markup as spaces and tabs at the end of a line in a kind of morse
code. A dictionary at the end includes links, etc. It can even handle
tables.

Both an abomination of MIME religion *and* a neat hack... pretty efficient,
too.

Rohit Khare