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From: ms6b+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU (Marvin Sirbu)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.multi-media
Subject: Re: Fallback and alternate presentations in multimedia/text mail syste
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Date: 16 Aug 90 13:07:16 GMT
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During the development of the ODA standards, there was some discussion of
"Alternative Content Representations" which would function much as you
propose -- i.e. along with a grpahic, you might send a raster which could
be printed by those terminals that supported fax but not CGM.

Unfortunately, it was not accepted.

ODA does include a simple text string alternate for a content portion, so
you can have a string that says "picture of polar bear goes here".

Marvin Sirbu