ietf-822
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Re: MIME-Version is *not* useless

1993-06-04 12:27:34
Nathaniel,

In regard to your comments:

 1.  There are already MIME implementations out there from MAJOR vendors
 (I won't point fingers) that will apparently die horribly if they get
 anything other than "1.0".   One could certainly argue that they
 shouldn't do this, but RFC 1341 didn't offer them any clear guidance on
 this score, so they're not really out of spec, and it is RUDE to break
 specs in people's faces.  Sometimes you have to, but I really don't
 think this case is important enough to do that.
 


I assume that I was the major vendor rep that is responsible for
the implementation being referred to.  What our implementation does
is to interpret anything other than a value of "1.0" as being
something that we can't process. We therefore pass it thru as is.
I think this is different from dieing horribly. We don't deal with a comment 
string correctly and have some other bugs in the parameter lists for text
parts but that's another issue :-(.

I don't agree that item #1 poses a serious constraint, because IF the
spec changes NOW to specify what should be done in the presence of a
non "1.0" value, then these vendors will have PLENTY of time to
incorporate the necessary revisions in future releases of their
products BEFORE there would actually be a non "1.0" value. 

My main objection to making the value anything other than 1.0 was more an
issue of timing. There was a suggestion that if the value was to be meaningful
it should be something other than 1.0 right off the bat. This would obviously
not be desirable from our point of view.

a non "1.0" MIME-Version does get defined and start to be used, only
those who bought the earliest versions of the products you allude to,
and who *still* use them at that time in the future (and have never
upgraded, nor switched to something different, etc) would be affected.
(And I don't feel we bear much responsibility for *any* vendor who
would release a product that really "dies horribly" in the face of
something that, at the worst, their software should regard as a
syntactically ill-formed message.)

I agree. I also tend to agree that lacking a specific need for the mechanism
and lacking a solid definition of what the mechanism would be, we should not
hold up the process.

Gabe Beged-Dov
HP Interface Technology Operation
Corvallis, Oregon
gabe(_at_)cv(_dot_)hp(_dot_)com (503)750-4415



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