The text/enriched MIME Content-type
RFC 1896
Document | Type |
RFC - Informational
(February 1996; No errata)
Was draft-resnick-text-enriched (individual)
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Authors | Amanda Walker , Pete Resnick | ||
Last updated | 2013-03-02 | ||
Stream | Legacy | ||
Formats | plain text html ps pdf htmlized bibtex | ||
Stream | Legacy state | (None) | |
Consensus Boilerplate | Unknown | ||
RFC Editor Note | (None) | ||
IESG | IESG state | RFC 1896 (Informational) | |
Telechat date | |||
Responsible AD | (None) | ||
Send notices to | (None) |
Network Working Group P. Resnick Request for Comments: 1896 QUALCOMM Obsoletes: 1523, 1563 A. Walker Category: Informational InterCon February 1996 The text/enriched MIME Content-type Status of this Memo This memo provides information for the Internet community. This memo does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Abstract MIME [RFC-1521] defines a format and general framework for the representation of a wide variety of data types in Internet mail. This document defines one particular type of MIME data, the text/enriched MIME type. The text/enriched MIME type is intended to facilitate the wider interoperation of simple enriched text across a wide variety of hardware and software platforms. This document is only a minor revision to the text/enriched MIME type that was first described in [RFC-1523] and [RFC-1563], and is only intended to be used in the short term until other MIME types for text formatting in Internet mail are developed and deployed. The text/enriched MIME type In order to promote the wider interoperability of simple formatted text, this document defines an extremely simple subtype of the MIME content-type "text", the "text/enriched" subtype. The content-type line for this type may have one optional parameter, the "charset" parameter, with the same values permitted for the "text/plain" MIME content-type. The text/enriched subtype was designed to meet the following criteria: 1. The syntax must be extremely simple to parse, so that even teletype-oriented mail systems can easily strip away the formatting information and leave only the readable text. 2. The syntax must be extensible to allow for new formatting commands that are deemed essential for some application. Resnick & Walker Informational [Page 1] RFC 1896 text/enriched MIME Content-type February 1996 3. If the character set in use is ASCII or an 8-bit ASCII superset, then the raw form of the data must be readable enough to be largely unobjectionable in the event that it is displayed on the screen of the user of a non-MIME-conformant mail reader. 4. The capabilities must be extremely limited, to ensure that it can represent no more than is likely to be representable by the user's primary word processor. While this limits what can be sent, it increases the likelihood that what is sent can be properly displayed. There are other text formatting standards which meet some of these criteria. In particular, HTML and SGML have come into widespread use on the Internet. However, there are two important reasons that this document further promotes the use of text/enriched in Internet mail over other such standards: 1. Most MIME-aware Internet mail applications are already able to either properly format text/enriched mail or, at the very least, are able to strip out the formatting commands and display the readable text. The same is not true for HTML or SGML. 2. The current RFC on HTML [RFC-1866] and Internet Drafts on SGML have many features which are not necessary for Internet mail, and are missing a few capabilities that text/enriched already has. For these reasons, this document is promoting the use of text/enriched until other Internet standards come into more widespread use. For those who will want to use HTML, Appendix B of this document contains a very simple C program that converts text/enriched to HTML 2.0 described in [RFC-1866]. Syntax The syntax of "text/enriched" is very simple. It represents text in a single character set--US-ASCII by default, although a different character set can be specified by the use of the "charset" parameter. (The semantics of text/enriched in non-ASCII character sets are discussed later in this document.) All characters represent themselves, with the exception of the "<" character (ASCII 60), which is used to mark the beginning of a formatting command. A literal less-than sign ("<") can be represented by a sequence of two such characters, "<<". Formatting instructions consist of formatting commands surrounded by angle brackets ("<>", ASCII 60 and 62). Each formatting command may be no more than 60 characters in length, all in US-ASCII, restricted to the alphanumeric and hyphen ("-") characters. Formatting commands Resnick & Walker Informational [Page 2] RFC 1896 text/enriched MIME Content-type February 1996 may be preceded by a solidus ("/", ASCII 47), making them negations,Show full document text