Although the minutes of TC #16 state that we didn’t approve Michael’s proposal to close #103 (“Specify handling of line breaks”), our sense of the discussion is that the TC did agree on an approach to resolving it. I’m going to produce a change draft that says: In the section on fileContent.text , specify that the content SHALL reflect the source file's link break convention (even though the spec does require fileContent.text to be transcoded to UTF-8). In the section on message.text (plain text message), specify that the line break convention is at the discretion of the SARIF producer. (The prohibition on line breaks in plain text messages is a SHOULD NOT , not a SHALL NOT .) Specify that a post-processor MAY normalize the line breaks if desired. Thanks, Larry