Ned,
Thank you for your clarification.
The specific issue as stake here is whether the following is acceptable:
Content-type: image/tiff; boundary=
"longboundarystringwrappedtonextlinetolimitlinelength"
It is completely legal.
This is what I believed. But is it wise?
Not really. While I doubt that many implementations would have trouble
unfolding this, using really long boundary markers where such a fold makes
sense isn't necessary, so why take the chance?
I ask this question because we have have found in early interoperability
testing that such headers can cause problems with other vendors' software.
Does your experience suggest that deployed MIME implementations generally
allow this form?
All sorts of egregiously incompliant implementations exist, of course. So as
always it is best to be liberal in what you accept, conservative in what you
emit.
But unfolding tends to be a fairly mindless operation so it is difficult to see
how implementations would get this wrong.
Comments in content-type lines, on the other hand, are best avoided, as they
serve no real purpose and likely will run afoul of implementations that don't
handle them correctly.
Ned