I'm very happy to announce the availability of a new draft of the MIME
document. This message will describe the changes briefly, and then will
point you at the new versions.
Significant changes to February draft of the
MIME document
1. IESG-mandated changes:
-- External-body stuff is expanded
& rewritten
-- IANA registration stuff expanded, rewritten, new Appendix
--
Nuked RFC-CHAR, 10646, iso-2022-jp, iso-8859-10.
-- Nuked pbm, pgm, ppm,
netfax.
2. Significant other changes
-- Altered the rule for partial
message reassembly to make a special case for Message-ID, because in the
previous version the first part and the whole message ended up with the same
Message-ID, which was bad.
-- Fixed a few genuine bugs in the richtext-to-text
translator, but rejected all functional enhancements.
-- Added "_" to the
characters acceptable in an multipart boundary.
-- Added an optional "size"
parameter for message/external-body.
3. Editorial changes
-- Not too many,
but fixed some more typos, etc.
-- All of the non-ASCII names (e.g. Olle
Järnefors) should now be correct.
ADDITIONAL ANNOUNCEMENTS
First of all, I
have learned that I must apologize profusely for the formatting in the January
draft. Apparently I issued the wrong command to produce the PostScript file,
which had several undesirable effects. First of all, it made it much uglier,
with several font screwups. Second, it made it very hard to compare it to the
previous version. Alas, fixing the mistake means repeating the latter problem
-- now that the fonts are right again, it will again be hard to compare. I
looked into using change bars, but concluded that it would take too long, and
we're all in a hurry. So, to atone for all of this, I'm also making available
a DIFF file that itemizes all the differences between the new and previous
TEXT versions of the draft.
Conspiciously absent from this draft is ANY
change to richtext. I would propose that we leave it as it is to get the
proposed standard out, but also form a subgroup (and sub-mailing list) of
interested parties to discuss richtext in more detail. I would further
propose that this subgroup will report back to the main group well in advance
of the move to draft standard. If the subgroup has mandated extensive changes
to richtext, it will obviously be necessary to spin it off to a separate
document at that point. If the changes are minor or (ha!) nonexistant, then
the two-document problem will be a political one to be resolved by the group
as a whole. This strikes me as a good way to proceed and to get MIME well
established without having anything held up by further richtext debate.
Anyway, the new drafts are found in the usual spot -- thumper.bellcore.com,
pub/nsb. This message is formatted as a MIME message that both contains
Olle's name properly and points you at the MIME document using the
message/external-body type. I presume that anyone on this list is either
using a MIME-compliant reader or understands MIME well enough to be able to
use the body part to retrieve it by hand, but if you're confused, send me
mail. And smile -- there's a light at the end of the tunnel! With any luck,
we'll have this turned around and back to the IAB in very short order. --
Nathaniel
- The PostScript version of MIME
<ftp://thumper/pub/nsb/BodyFormats> -
- The Text Version of MIME
<ftp://thumper/pub/nsb/BodyFormats> -
- The DIFFS for the Text version
<ftp://thumper/pub/nsb/FEB> -