Re: Content-Canonicalization: crlf?

>The bottom line is that MIME plus the collectiong of
>defined types presents a single, consistent format for material.

The issue as I see it is that there is an enormous amount of data flying around in what practically everyone would recognize as "ascii text" with CRLF delimiters.  On many systems, this must be converted to the local text format.

Yes, if the MUA knows the type requires it, it can perform this conversion.  Unfortunately, for an unknown content-type the right thing is unlikely to be done.

What I would like to see is a hint in the headers that the data is really textual, even though it's not readily human readable, and hence not a candidate for text/*.

Yes, this is redundant information if the recipient possesses the full opus of defined MIME types.  Unfortunately, there's no guarantee that the receiver is up-to-date in his definitions.

Nor, I admit, is there any guarantee that the sender is up-to-date enough to know to put the "hint" in.  However, the sender can usually resend the data if the wrong thing is done.  The recipient doesn't always have the option to re-receive it.

So I would see what Laurence proposes as a way to protect against out-of-date MIME type definitions for a common special case.

-- 
Steve Dorner, Qualcomm Incorporated
"I seem to recall a time before consultants roamed the earth. ... The people
you'd meet would have actual jobs."