At 12:18 PM 11/20/95, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
which has no technical justification and should not be in the spec.
....
I know what the spec says, and I say it is wrong. It is wrong because it
presumes that all header information meaningful to a body part has been
defined with the intention of being in a body-part. The fact is that
Roy, remember that one of my earlier notes asserted clearly and
forcefully that MIME is ugly. It specified one, particular reason that
caused it to be ugly but I'm perfectly willing to believe that there are
others.
In point of fact, none of that matters. We won't get anywhere
criticising basic issues in MIME reality. It is what it is. We need to
specify enhancements that live with that reality rather than try to make
the rather large installed base -- did I say "rather", well heavens, I
occasionally DO indugle in understatement -- change.
I can understand why you don't want to change the MIME spec at this point.
However, I consider any MIME implementation that does not make all of the
header fields available to MIME processing to be broken by design, regardless
We could debate that point. Wee could even note that broken
behavior is not exactly new to the email world (how DOES it EVER work???)
In the current case we have good indication that there is a substantial
installed base that behaves in this way and that I believe we won't get
away with jerking them around unless we go through IETF formal hoops. Such
hoops can be jumped through but the basic requirement is that there be
massively big benefit for the massively big pain that will ensue. Hard to
believe that the current issue qualifies.
d/
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