Subject: Protocol Action: The Text/Plain Format Parameter to Proposed Standard

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 17:07:17 -0400

The IESG has approved the Internet-Draft 'The Text/Plain Format
Parameter' <draft-gellens-format-06.txt> as a Proposed Standard.
This has been reviewed in the IETF but is not the product of an IETF
Working Group.

The IESG contact persons are Keith Moore and Patrik Faltstrom

Technical Summary
 
The paper specifies a new parameter to the text/plain media type. The
new parameter gives ability to mail clients to tell wether a CRLF
combination should be a "hard" or "soft" line wrap depending on if it
is immediately following a space. The format gives the ability for
sending clients to insert line wraps at every line to keep the
line-length below 79 characters, and still informing the receiving
client where the break of a paragraph is (hard-wrap) so the receiving
client can reformat the paragraph if wanted -- for example to the
width of the display. The specification is backward compatible with
existing text/plain specification.

Working Group Summary

The discussions started around a new media type called
text/paragraph. Over time, the discussions asked if it was not
possible to do something backward compatible with text/plain. This
paper is the result of those discussions, and the changes from -05
(which was last-called) to -06 is the result of the last call.

Protocol Quality

The spec was reviewed by Patrik Faltstrom. There are a few early
implementations of the specification.

Note to RFC Editor:

When preparing draft-gellens-format-06.txt for publication as an RFC,
please make the following change in section 4.8:

Please replace the line:

    Here we have the same exchange, in quoted form:

With this text:

    To show an example of quoting, here we have the same exchange,
presented as a series of direct quotes: