Re: About the media types text/x-php and text/x-php-source
On 2012-08-28 11:43:32 +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> 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.
An advantage of text/* is that there isn't a need to teach them.
However the sender must make sure that the provided charset is
correct. Now, the sender could also provide a charset with
application/*, in which case the recipient client should know
that this is necessarily text.
Subversion is also affected by this problem, and unfortunately there
is no way to tell it that some application/* types are text-based.
> The whole point of the text/* classification system is to allow a
> sensible fallback in this case.
Yes.
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Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@vinc17.net> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.net/>
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