Laurence,
I think this is the fault of early implementations rather than of
MIME itself; I note the example from RFC 1343, the original
..mailcap file format:
Thus, if the message has a
Content-type line of:
Content-type: multipart/mixed; boundary=42
and the mailcap file has a line of:
multipart/*; /usr/local/bin/showmulti
%t %{boundary}
then the equivalent of the following command should be
executed:
/usr/local/bin/showmulti multipart/mixed 42
MH is a pain to configure for multipart processing (or I haven't
found the magic bullet yet....), but I don't think that's a general
thing across all implementations.
I don't think this is part of the MIME spec, or any standards-track
thingummybob, but we might want to think of writing a "MIME style guide",
kind of "RFC 1343 revisited", that could say things like:
- Some MIME things need to chew whole multiparts
- Parsing of some MIME objects give other MIME objects; be prepared
for recursive invocation or "here's it coming back"
- Why you shouldn't use spaces in boundaries even if it is allowed
I'm sure the list is endless, but some list may be better than no list.
Volunteers?
Harald A