Excerpts from internet.ietf-822: 23-Oct-91 Re: SHOW STOPPERS in the ne..
Mark Crispin(_at_)panda(_dot_)com (1257)
But at the very least the requirement for a Content-Type
must be abolished, and replaced with an explicit statement that the default
Content-Type is always `TEXT; charset=US-ASCII'.
I can live with this to. In fact, it's my preference. I can't even
remember who it was that argued to make this mandatory.
I could even live with getting rid of the requirement for Body-Version,
though I kind of like it -- it means that you can, in fact, assume that
the message was composed with XXXX in mind, an that the default
assumption of text/us-ascii is valid. (Without it, it might be a
uuencoded tar file or whatever.)
Note that I don't think anything in the document requires these headers
in body parts, only in top-level message headers, so Mark is (I think)
wrong that even the current version of the document invalidates
multipart/digest. -- NB