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

[Bruce Lilly]

On Tue April 19 2005 12:24, Larry Masinter wrote:
> I wish you would reply and say why you think your proposal
> (put processing instructions in a parameter) is better than
> what I recently proposed as an alternative (put processing
> instructions in a comment in the body).

I think I was composing just such a response at the same time that
you were composing your message.

> MIME parameters tend to get lost when the MIME bodies are
> pushed through most file systems.

That's a general issue with such file systems. It applies to most
types and parameters.  For that matter, it applies even if MIME
mechanisms aren't used.  Some systems resort to guesses ("heuristics");
others pretend that Bill Shakespeare was wrong, that a name (or portion
thereof) conveys some essential information.

> MIME parameters are hard 
> to set up for HTTP servers; it's difficult to configure
> them to emit widely variable processing instructions, e.g.,
> if you were to have several different text/troff files,
> each with different processing instructions.

The same could be said for several different text/plain files, each
with a different charset.  Solutions to the problem include groping
through the content (unreliable and inefficient) and maintaining a
database of metadata.
 
> If don't REALLY intend for the processing instructions to be
> handled automatically, and you REALLY intend for humans to read
> and interpret them, you're better off bundling them inside
> the body anyway.

See the issues regarding retrieval of sizable remote content.