Re: About the media types text/x-php and text/x-php-source

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Christoph Anton Mitterer writes ("Re: About the media types text/x-php and text/x-php-source"):
> On Mon, 2012-08-27 at 09:02 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> > There are a fair number
> > of email clients out there that, rightly or wrongly, will not display
> > inline attachments of type application/*, but will do so for text/*.
> Not only MUAs, unfortunately.
> 
> > This
> > switch therefore means that attached scripts have to be saved and opened
> > separately rather than viewed directly inline in the mail client, which is
> > occasionally quite awkward.  Or, alternately, one has to attach scripts as
> > text/plain, thus losing the language information that could otherwise be
> > conveyed.  (There are some, although not many, mail clients that, given
> > proper MIME tagging of language information, will do syntax highlighting
> > of attached code.)
> 
> I know that this is a pain in the ares, but actually one should then
> rather try to fix these clients ;-)

But the clients aren't broken.  They simply haven't been taught about
every possible programming language.  That is not a bug.  There will
always be some language whose special mime type is not implemented
everywhere.

The whole point of the text/* classification system is to allow a
sensible fallback in this case.

Ian.