In <ylk7hmgjqw(_dot_)fsf(_at_)windlord(_dot_)stanford(_dot_)edu> Russ Allbery
<rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu> writes:
Charles Lindsey <chl(_at_)clw(_dot_)cs(_dot_)man(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk> writes:
6. MIME is a set of protocols defined for the Email world, as is
explicitly stated in RFC 2045. Officially speaking, there is no such
thing as MIME within Netnews (which accounts for its extremely poor
uptake within Usenet).
I doubt this. I believe that the slow uptake of MIME within Usenet is due
to other issues entirely, primarily that many news servers have had to
block attachments of any kind because of space constraints and abuse and
MIME makes it easier for people to attach documents, and even more because
of some horrible misuse of multipart/alternative back in the early days.
It is certainly true that misuse of multipart/alternative has turned
people off the use of multipart/mixed, which could have some reasonable
applications on Usenet (particularly in the form of multipart/digest).
I really don't think the lack of official standardization for Usenet had
anything to do with it, and I believe that if you look, you'll find that
many, if not most, Usenet messages have Content-Type and MIME-Version
headers. I don't think that's extremely poor uptake.
On the contrary, Content-Type, and particularly its charset parameter, is
about the only feature of MIME that HAS been taken up on Usenet. The only
other MIME feature with noticeable exposure has been RFC 2047 for poster's
names.
And Content-Type: image/* is hardly used (I agree it should be, in places
where binaries are welcome). All we have is bad jokes about what Microsoft
software does with lines in text/plain that start with "begin " :-( .
--
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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