O.K. let's take a break and correct bigger things during after
more experimentation....
Rather than have anyone be surprised later, I'd like to make sure that
the next opportunity to correct major deficiencies in MIME should be
thought of in terms of 2, or more, years from now. That is, after MIME goes
fully through the standards process and gets fielded.
A document is allowed to go to Proposed standard only when it has reached
stability, with no KNOWN problems. (An ommitted feature is not a problem;
it is a decision to limit functionality.)
This does NOT mean that additional Content-Type sub-types may not be
defined. Quite the contrary. MIME is carefully designed to allow such
additions at the convenience of whoever authors such extensions. However,
MIME, itself, must remain stable. To go from Proposed to Draft, only
relatively minor problems may be mixed, and none may cause a "major"
change to the spec, or else the document will need to be re-established
at the Proposed level.
Dave