On Thu, 15 Aug 1996 23:01:25 -0700 Dave Crocker
<dcrocker(_at_)brandenburg(_dot_)com> wrote:
Yes, we need to audit functions not implemented and remove them
from the spec. do you have any candidates for removal?
Just a hunch, based on MUAs I've looked at recently, but
multipart/alternative
and
multipart/parallel
are good starters. The only creation-implementations I know of
either require either hand-fussing (e.g., editing
proto-outgoing-messages from /mixed) or specialized assembly
macros that are not what we normally consider MUAs (e.g., the
process used to prepare the I-D announcements).
The difficulty I'm having here is that I consider at least one
of these to be a very valuable and important feature (which
makes the question Harald asks about what we do about the stuff
that we "remove" very important), but I wonder if we really have
the implementations. Parallel is even worse, because I've been
involved in several conversations (and imagine others have too)
that question whether it really is the right design and contains
the right information to permit a sender to convey adequate
information to a receiver to make the thing useful. And we find
that out only by implementing the thing and getting it out there
widely enough to accumulate some serious operational experience.
The problem here, obviously, is that coming up with an
implementation of these things in the sense of some prototype-
or demonstration-quality critter that can demonstrate the
ability to put the right format out on the wire and then read it
from the wire is trivial and uninteresting. Implementing to a
level of quality needed to show actual utility -- that the
feature has the right syntax and semantics to actually serve
useful purpose as defined -- is, IMO, another matter and I'm not
convinced that we are there yet.
john