Currently, there seems no consensus on what you display when you receive a Mime
multipart where all the Content-Types are text (or other inline-able types) but
there are no Content-Dispositon headers to guide you. RFC 2183 is silent as
regards a defaults for Content-Dispositon.
Currently, there seem three schools of thought:
1. You display the first part inline, and consider all the subsequent
ones to be "attachments".
2. You display all the parts inline, with some separator between them,
such as a ruled line across the page.
3. You display all the parts inline, with no visible separator. With
care, you can even arrange to change parts within a single line (perhaps
to intrpoduce a new character set or languauge) and have the result
displayed seemlessly.
AFAIK, the only agent to provide #3 is Turnpike, and they seem to be
especially proud of their achievement :-).
Note that all 3 possibilities are perfectly legal, which is a problem
because people can then write messages/articles not knowing how they are
gpoing to be presented at the far end. Life gets even more complicated
when you consider what is the correct way to generate a followup to such
an article or message, and what you do with any signatures that may be
included within any of the parts.
So my question is: What do people on this list feel is the "correct", or
the "intended" or the "best" interpretation?
The question arises because we are writing the relevant pieces of text
for the draft-grandson-of-1036, and we are considering whether to say
anything firm on this issue. But if we do so, we would like to hear the
opinion of the email gurus first, since it would be a pity if news and
email were to diverge signficiantly on this issue.
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Email: chl(_at_)clw(_dot_)cs(_dot_)man(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk Web:
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Voice/Fax: +44 161 437 4506 Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
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