At 12:06 PM 10/28/94, Ned Freed wrote:
Help me out, Steve. I've deleted a bunch of mail,
so I might have missed something. To transfer agents now act upon the
Content-Type? The whole reason why MIME was created was (I thought)
to save ourselves from the evils that the transfer agents might do.
MIME was actually created to deal with multiple character sets. Its creation
was not driven by any desire for multimedia, or any desire to clean up tranport
evils, or anything like that. You got all the other stuff "for free" ;-)
In hindsight I wish that text/plain had been specified as being
canonicalized using newline conventions particular to the character set,
and that charsets had been required to specify a canonical newline
convention before they could be registered (naturally, anything derived
from US-ASCII would use 0D 0A).
You might say in response that this is too much of a burden on MUAs,
because they would have to know the newline conventions for a multitude of
character sets. My answer is, if simple MUAs chose to always assume that
the newline convention was 0D 0A and ignore the charset parameter, we'd be
no worse off than we are today in terms of interoperability.
In fact, we'd be better off because more sophisiticated MUAs would have the
option of using text/plain to communicate with each other. Yes, for maximum
interoperability, people would still be forced to use an ASCII-derived
charset, because of MUAs that always assumed the newline convention was 0D
0A. But that is the situation we are in today. And the MIME standard would
have been capable of supporting better MUAs.
As time goes on, if Unicode or another non-ASCII character set catches on,
MIME would have been able to handle it. As things stand now, we'll have to
define another content type.
----------------------------
David Goldsmith
david_goldsmith(_at_)taligent(_dot_)com
Taligent, Inc.
10201 N. DeAnza Blvd.
Cupertino, CA 95014-2233