X-KDE-IsAlso=text/plain

[Nicolas Goutte]

On Wednesday 27 July 2005 02:09, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> Nicolas Goutte wrote:
> >> Any text/* can be opened in a text editor, by definition.
> >
> >That hardly enough. Non-ASCII text files are now defined as application,
> > for example application/xhtml+xml, because text/* is supposed to be
> > some ASCII-compatible.
>
> That doesn't make what I said wrong, but I do see your point: we need a
> way of telling whether non text/* files are text files as well.
>
> By the way, UTF-16 isn't ASCII compatible and is allowed on text/*, for
> all I know.

It is not really of problem of being allowed or not. It seems more that IANA 
seems to have changed the way of seeing text/*, especially due to UTF-16 (and 
UTF-32).

>
> >> If the user can make heads or tails of it is another story.
> >
> >Yes and this is the problem. text/* does not mean text/plain.
>
> Non-issue. It can be opened in a text editor without loss of information
> and that's the point here. Opening a binary file cannot be expected not
> to lose anything -- the text editor may decide to drop misplaced CR or
> LFs, or ignore NUL bytes, etc.

Sure it can be opened by a text editor.

And sure a text editor can change a binary file, especially an editor like 
Kate that is Unicode-based and that is not meant to be binary-transparent 
(what many users of Kate seems to have problems to understand).

>
> Defining that text/rtf to be opened in KWord doesn't mean that it KWrite
> isn't allowed to open it, if KWord isn't present.

RTF is quite an example for a file format that is barely human-readable, as it 
can have very large lines (not counting the \bin keyword, which makes the 
file binary.)

Have a nice day!