Clearly Bill's right that our basic difference is in what we expect the
multipart type to be used for. Bill expects its use to be rare, with
most mixed media formats sent as is, while I disagree.
People used to think that multimedia mail could be come universal
through use of a single format that the whole world would adopt. I
think that's very unlikely. However, I think that the multipart format
at least has a chance of structuring the multiple formats that will
inevitably be used. In other words, I think that converting
Word/Frame/whatever into and out of multipart is a lot more plausible
than going into and out of ODA, because multipart is so simple.
If I'm wrong -- and if the world is going to forever use a wide variety
of proprietary formats for email -- then, to my mind, we're wasting our
time. RFC 1049 was sufficient for doing that. They could have said
Content-type: MS-Word and been done with it.
I'm shooting for a higher level of interoperability here. My preference
is to explore the possibility that people really do want to interoperate
by defining a clear and simple standard for doing so. -- Nathaniel