ietf-822
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Re: Internet Message Bodies DRAFT revisions

1991-06-19 06:21:11
So much for "relatively inactive"....

As Mark indicated, I basically agree with his proposal.  However, I
thought I ought to make clear why it wasn't written that way in the
first place.  The only time when it might seem strongly desirable to put
an encoding on a non-innermost part (i.e. a message or a multipart) is
if a message has been floating around in a world of 8 bit transport and
is gatewayed back to 7-bit land.  In the existing draft, you could do
this by encoding the whole message.  WIth Mark's proposal, the gateway
would have to parse the parts and only encode the lowest-level parts. 
I'm not a purist, but this does smack somewhat of bad layering.

The choice seems to be complexity in the UA (which is what Mark is up
against now) and complexity in gateways (which someone will be up
against some day).  I just wanted to paint the choices clearly. 
Personally, I have no problem with pushing the complexity to the
gateway, but it does mean that an 8-bit to 7-bit MTA gateway will have
to parse multipart messages....  -- Nathaniel