It's possible that I got a bit off-track in my last message.
I apologize for the tirade. Let me start over.
Let me restate this: we need to look at MIME as an
off-the-wire concept. MIME is *great*, and the spec is *great* as
long as we stay on-the-wire, and that's fine. But people are using
MIME off-the-wire and looking at the same on-the-wire spec. This
needs to be, at least, clarified, better, formally addressed.
I agree with at least part of this. I think it would be a good idea
to have a separate, informational, document that described how to deal
with what a MIME message looks like when it's been munged from the
on-the-wire format into your local off-the-wire format.
Doing so might even make the standard MIME documents simpler, because
then they could really stick to talking about "on-the-wire" form.
There's also a somewhat related issue of how to encode MIME messages
that contain binary body parts, in environments where the traditional
text end-of-line character is newline. It's not quite "on-the-wire"
versus "off-the-wire", it's more like different wires have different
"on-the-wire" representations. Anyway, it wouldn't hurt to address
this either.
Keith