RFC 1896 (rfc1896) - Page 1 of 21

The text/enriched MIME Content-type

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