The MAILCAP stuff is about making the third alternative possible.
Harald A
Harald,
Regarding your thoughts on this -- I have been contemplating what you said
as well as statements others have made; and, in a message to me, Patrik made
the following comment:
....
So far, all clients have to handle all transport encodings (Base64 and QP)
to be MIME compliant. Should this new one also be mandatory (not!), and if
so, what is the fallback procedure for a client that gets an unknown
transport encoding?
In light of what I'm hearing, I would like to discuss another possibility.
I was at the IETF meeting in 1993 when it was stated that the MIME version
number shall always be 1.0.
Why? I don't know, I did not ask.
I do think that it is possible that this version number may/could be used
for something useful.
Usually version numbers in software release follow a specific pattern, but
there is no law that states that this pattern need be followed.
My suggestion is that the version number be used to determine what features
the MIME mailer in question understands. They do NOT have to follow 1,2,3,4
etc. but they could.
Version . Sub
Sub could be used to determine this mailer understands transfer-encodings
x.y.z etc.
Version could be used to determine feature sets this version of the mailer
supports.
In this way, all you need to do is scan the version number for the
features/encodings ( and of course the first step is to get all the MIME
compliant mailers to do the scanning first.
In my mind it seems like a waste of chars to always put version 1.0 there.
May be a radical idea, but it seems like common sense to me....
Regards to all,
-al