I disagree very strongly with the *last*. It really ought to be *first*. A
good analogy is a business letter. You start out with the cover letter on
top, and then attached to the letter (using a paper clip or staple) and
always after the cover letter, you find the attachments. So too with email
attachments: first the cover letter, and THEN the attachments.
Thanks for pointing this detail out -- I had missed it. Of course I agree
with
you about it: if we're going to use multipart/attachment, I would prefer to
see
it contain only attachments. If one part is special it should be the first
part.
Hello Ned. I have been out of contact with this WG for a while due to
my heavy work load. I read some messages posted to this WG today, my
general feel is that FLEXIBILITY CREATES PROBLEMS.
Would it be OK to create this new mail standard in a simple flat
way: anything other than the message headers are message bodies. In other
words, user signatures, file attachments, and whatsoever not in the header
part, are message body. Let the users decide how they put their message-body-
parts in their favorable order. Some people like to put the cover letters
first; some people even like to staple their business cards on the cover
letters--it means they put their "signature" on top of the cover letters;
some people like to put a small "post it" notice on their cover letters--
it means they put "file attachments" on top of their cover letter.......
Well, who is right? who is wrong? nobody knows. We propably need to leave
these humanity/culture stuff to the humanity schools. Further, in some
countries, people send their cover letter in a separate envelope with
a line of "the detail documents are sent in another mail (snail mail) package".
Indeed, if you do not define anything in the body part, users can obtain
more flexibilities. If users like to draft their messages in a certain
format, they certainly can write a couple of lines of scripts to customize it.
I guess it would be more productive if people in this WG focus on the message
headers instead of the message bodies.
shannon
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