GtkTextBuffer serialization formats: why no "text/plain" ?

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Hi;

The new serialize/deserialize API for GtkTextBuffer looks to be very
useful to accessibility among other things.  I am currently using it to
implement AtkStreamableContent, an interface which allows objects with
streamable backing data (for instance images, HTML widgets, text
containers...) to advertise that fact and stream the data to remote
clients such as assistive technologies.

However I am somewhat surprised to see in gtk-demo's Hypertext widget
that, although there's a serialization format called
"application/x-gtk-rich-text", there's no "text/plain".  

Of course serialization via plain text would not be lossless, but why
isn't there a plain text serialization available for all GtkTextBuffer
instances?  We certainly need it for the accessibility case - otherwise
we'll have to fake one in gail, necessitating multiple code paths or at
least some odd concatenation of "text/plain" if it is not among those
returned by gtk_text_buffer_get_serialize_formats...

regards,

Bill