Testing the waters for text/troff

[Bruce Lilly]

On Mon November 22 2004 18:51, Martin Duerst wrote:
> I don't remember anything. I guess an explanation for this would
> be that nroff/troff isn't usually passed to applications directly
> (i.e. neither for mailers nor for browsers).

Curiously, the original Content-Type specification (RFC 1049) did
mention troff.   I definitely wouldn't want to encourage automatic
passing of content to applications, as there are security implications.
Nevertheless, the textual content (ignoring formatting
directives) is still comprehensible when viewed as ordinary text,
comparable to (some would say better than) SGML and its
variants.  Having a registered label as a text media subtype
provides a way to indicate the content type as text (with markup)
as opposed to an opaque blob (application/octet-stream).

> But if you think it's 
> something you and others want to use, please go ahead and write a
> draft.

I've started one.

> At the momement, I can't immagine anything that would lead 
> to a rejection of a well-written proposal. The main issues that
> I can immagine (although I'm not an expert on ?roff stuff) you will
> have to deal with would probably have to do with versioning.

There are certainly version and other compatibility (application-
level interoperability) issues, but I believe that they're manageable.
Regarding the mechanics of dealing with the registration template,
the biggest problem seems to be finding something appropriate for
some of the obscure things asked for; for example, I have no idea
what "Macintosh File Type Code(s)" is supposed to mean
[searching for "Macintosh File Type Code" on the Apple web site
yielded zero useful results].