Gentlemen!
Could we
1. cool down the debqte
2. most important, put all your highly interesting comments
in their appropriate context
The discussion is wrongly comparing discussing 3 completely separate
issues (at least). That is worse that "apples and oranges", worse
even than "chevres et choux" (ie. goats and cabbages).
We have:
- discussion of composite document structure and format
- discussion of character sets for text (usability, eficiency...)
- discussion of capabilities of MUA/UI and installed base
(- not including the real goal: user desire/requirements :-(
MIME is a document structuring model and encoding.
- per se it has nothing to do with charsets
- it just enables to label text parts with appropriate alphabet
indicators and to use a transfer encoding suited to the transport
mechanism underneath
SO it is just plain silly to
- propose to avoid MIME by using a given ISO-xxxxx charset
how do I send external body-parts, sound ... with ISO-xxxx
- even if/when there is one single charset we will NEED MIME to
separate body-parts, to know that these octets are text or
images, that they are encoded or not
Charset repertoire issue
[[ I have no special skills in this domain, just plain user
requirements]]
- there exist SEVERAL charsets today and people are using them
-- thus a need to "label" them within documents
- thr worst situation is to use something without informing
-- this is true for the language, for the charset and for
the encoding/representation/compression
- We users need somthings which works, we don't really understand
what are closed community (how do I know the recipeint
belongs to my community sharing unwriten assumptions/choices?)
WE know that you experts don't know what are these colsed communities
and often don't know well what are our (end-user) needs.
- We don't want any solution that is limited/closed, we don't want any
solution that aks us to directly understand/Handle these issues.
Please provide us with UA/UI (MUA/MUI when mail) able to do
all this for us transparently
--> this clearly goes for MIME, needed to enable the software
to process automaticaly on the user behalf representation and
encoding
- we don't know which choice is more efficient easy to implement
and we don't care, it is up to the implementors to decide
BUT we want a workable solution/product
-- this leads to the next point capabilities/availability of
the UA/UI installed based
UA/UI capabilities/availability
- even if it is proven that ISO-yyyy is far superior to ISO-xxxx, as a user
I will not want any MUA/UI which encodes all my outgoing mail
within ISO-yyy is I know that 82.7 % of the recipient will
be unable to proces/read this message
- even if ISO-xxxx is proven and widely deployed, I will not want any user
that will not allow me to view the 13.6 % of message that are still
using 1984, 1989, and 1994 best solutions
- We (USERS) do need MUA/UI able to handle several char-set and encodings
ie. all the one with significant use
- the choice of the charsets used/recognized by the MUA/UI is a
software supplier problem, they do have to study the effective market
and make their proposals
- the choice of the MUA/UI is OUR (user) choice and we inevitably will
not buy the products from the suppliers that
- pretend (true or not is not relevant) that they have
the best (theoretical) solution
-prevent us from communicating easily with all the other people
This is not theory, the market punishes very hard all the
ones that tend to ignore its pragmatic laws.
---------
This being said, I believe the discussion as a lot of interest,
if it is focused
1. MIME
alternatives (to MIME)?
improvements?
gatewaying (eg. X.400 and/or proprietary things)?
2. charsets
which choices?
existing practice must be covered
but what is recommended? what is likeky to happen?
will ISO-xxx Unicode... really deploy...
3. today operational issues
we have several charsets, several requirements
do we need recommended guidelines? (IMHO yes)
which guidelines?
how to facilitate/speed up migration toward better
interworking practice (eg EMIL approach)?
---
these were my 2 cents of "plain stupidity", "boring whatever",
"brain-damaged stuff"....
-- I take these too lines to self qualify my message, in order
to save bandwidth as it seems a new etiquette of this list
to honour contributors with "birds names".
-- if some of you however insists in sending me that kind
of comments, I am ready and prepared to receive and ignore them
but PLEASE, do send these privately and not the 1000 of recipts
regards
-- PAP