HTTP disregards this part of the MIME spec because it
must do so in order retain entity information within body parts,
and I don't like disregarding the MIME spec when I shouldn't have to
(i.e., when the design constraints of the two systems are identical).
I was not aware that HTTP disregards this. If so its only because I was
asleep
at the switch, and didn't catch it when the document was reviewed. Now that
you
have pointed it out I will be alert to it and will lobby to have HTTP
changed
and not MIME.
That isn't even possible. While removing the two sentences I referred to
would add functionality to MIME (not supported by existing MIME systems),
enforcing them on HTTP would remove existing functionality from deployed
web browsers. Removing that functionality from the HTTP standard would just
invalidate the standard -- it would have no affect on practice.
Either way, MIME systems will either have to adapt to that practice or
lose information when viewing multiparts from HTTP.
Wrong again, I'm afraid. Such situations are easily rectified by:
(1) Fix the broken specifications so they do things correctly.
(2) Allow for existing installed base behavior as a carefully delineated
exception to the rules.
(3) Fix all agents to support both forms.
(4) Don't let it happen again.
I have no real problem with a one-time fix to allow certain exceptions to the
rules for a small set of fields. I can support that. In fact I can even do
without the "correction" implied by (1), although I would like to see it
happen.
What I object to is the attempt to remove rules, rules that have an excellent
reason for being there, rules that many agents depend on, just because someone
screwed up somewhere else and did something that was later found not to
interoperate properly.
Either this entire process and the interoperability it engenders means
something, in which case its important to follow the rules laid down in
earlier specifications, or it doesn't, in which case we might as well
just implement whatever we damn well please and have no interoperability
at all.
Ned