RFC 1896 (rfc1896) - Page 2 of 21

The text/enriched MIME Content-type

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 "", 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