regarding your comments on proposed media type text/troff' toInformational RFC

[Bruce Lilly]

Larry,

Thanks for your comments.

On Mon April 18 2005 15:06, Larry Masinter wrote:
> How about removing the "process" parameter and instead suggesting that
> instructions be included in the source document, in a comment,
> explaining how to process the document, including possible
> recommended command lines, environment variables, preprocessors,
> warnings.

The draft does note that it is possible to include such information
in comments, and cautions against conflicting information.

> Make it explicit that there is no standard format for such
> instructions,

That's one of the problems for authors and recipients.

> and that receivers of text/troff documents should 
> not attempt to try to automatically interpret such instructions
> because instructions might vary widely in format, language,
> and syntax, or contain preconditions or warnings or other
> information.

The more important reason to avoid automatic interpretation is that
is is unsafe to do so.

> It would even be reasonable to suggest, to the creators
> of text/troff content, the complete set of information
> that would be required in such instructions, and even
> some useful guidelines about how to write them in a way
> that others will have good luck interpreting them.
> But by not creating a standard syntax, you will avoid
> encouraging writers of receivers to build automatic
> launch information.

One problem with not having standard syntax is that it may be
impossible for a recipient to understand prose instructions
(would you be able to comprehend instructions in Arabic or
Chinese, for example?).  Of course, a standard or convention
could be used for embedding processing comments in the content,
but that requires having the content available (would you want to
download a 10 MB file only to find out that you cannot use it?).
A Content-Type field parameter is available when the media
itself is not (via HTTP negotiation, via message/external-body,
etc., and can be used to make decisions about retrieval).
Information in the Content-Type field provides metadata for the
media content, and can be stored in a database entry for the
media content (some computer operating systems have such a
facility for storing metadata for files).  The specific parameters
defined for this specific media type constitute such metadata
which can be stored and retrieved by that general mechanism.