At 00/03/20 15:21 -0800, ned(_dot_)freed(_at_)INNOSOFT(_dot_)COM wrote:
> let me see if I understand you correctly: what you are saying is that
> people will expect the new convention (whatever it is) to work and
> control the recipient's MIME readers's fallback behavior even in
> the presence of a vast installed base that neither understands this
> convention nor XML?
No, that is not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that a new agent, one that
depends on the parameter being present, only works if it is present. And this
then implies that a substantial number of agents need to send the tag in order
for it to be useful. This won't happen soon if at all, so my agent that I
wrote
which depends on the tag we've called for ends up not working.
All the experience that I have had and seen reported with the 'charset'
parameter suggests that this is indeed a problem. Adding another
parameter, and getting it to work, would take years. It is only
recently that e.g. Apache was updated to include an 'AddCharset'
directive to make it easier to set the charset on the Content-Type.
With -xml, you get immediate benefits. Webmasters will set the type
to image/svg-xml just because there is nothing else. Webmasters
won't be much inclined to add a parameter that looks obvious anyway.
Although I do not claim that 'charset' should have been a type
suffix (the benefits of having it orthogonal are big enough in
that case), I think all the experience from 'charset' clearly
points to -xml as the solution.
Regards, Martin.