Re: Thoughts on the standardization of Org

[TEC]

Daniele Nicolodi <daniele@grinta.net> writes:

> On 02/11/2020 10:02, TEC wrote:
> > I think there are absolutely some benefits for Org users. I am
> > personally interested in registering Org as an IANA MIME type.
>
> I don't think that registering Org as IANA MIME type will have 
> the
> consequences you hope it has.

Hmmm. I'm glad you've brought this up. I wouldn't want to put in 
hours
of effort for a unlikely benefit.
My hope is that registering org as an IANA MIME type will cause it 
to
trickle down into individual MIME registries.

The benefit I see here is Org being able to be treated more as a 
'first
class' plaintext format --- like I see markdown being treated 
today.
Open a ".md" file in Ocular and you see a nice rendered version (I 
use
this as a general, not specific example).

Then, if we can package Emacs into an LSP client, we can provide a 
very
well-featured Org experience to dozens of editors, and the 
"text/*"
association will be important to ensure that Org files are opened 
in
those text editors.

For people who use editors like VSCode, being able to send an Org 
file
and have it open in VSCode will likely prompt them to install an
extension that provides support for .org files...

This may be a bit unrealistic, and I'm hugely appreciative of any 
effort
to inform me of any aspects that I may be overlooking.

> Finally, even if you get your attachment automatically tagged as
> "text/org", the receiving side needs to have a mime type handler
> configured to display it. As far as I know, not even Emacs (on 
> the
> platforms that allow it) registers itself as an handler for any 
> MIME
> type. Therefore, what you get, assuming that the mail client on 
> the
> other side behaves correctly and uses "text/*" as a fallback for
> "text/org" is that your attachment will be displayed in a 
> generic text
> editor.

1. Could Emacs change to register itself as a text/org handler?
2. See above for why I don't think that opening it in a generic 
text
editor would necessarily be a bad idea.

> I send Org files as "text/plain" (often even using ".txt" 
> extension to
> avoid confusion on the receiving side) and I think this is the 
> best
> choice as it puts the least burden on the receiving side to 
> consume the
> content and it is displayed inline by most email clients.

This seems like a good idea, thanks for sharing it!

> I don't think that registering "text/org" with the IANA will 
> have the
> consequences that you hope it has.

Thanks for highlighting some potential pitfalls that I haden't
considered. As outlined above, in light of your comments I still 
see
this being potentially beneficial/worth the effort, but you've 
opened my
eyes to some complications that I was previously unaware of.

Thank you,

Timothy.