In a message written on Tue, Jan 07, 2003 at 03:20:55PM -0800, Russ Allbery
wrote:
* Extend MIME (eg, define types) to allow for "message/rfcM". Boom,
e-mail is good.
You've lost me here. How does defining message/rfcM let you deal with
UTF-8 headers in e-mail?
message/multipart
- text/plain
"This is a news article you need to approve/disapprove."
or
"This is a news article that has been gatewayed to e-mail."
- message/rfcM
- UTF-8 article, base64 encoded
Is it pretty? No. Do the headers directly translate, no.
For the moderation issue, I don't think this is a problem. The real
issue is an e-mail<->news gateway for Joe Average, and this gives
mailers today a way to ignore things they don't understand. I see
some minor problems with translating some headers (eg, a From: line
with UTF-8 in it), however again during the interim a gateway can
just set "From: my-news-gateway(_at_)gatewaydomain(_dot_)foo".
Then, in one magical day in the future when UTF-8 mailers are common
the gateways can change to just sending a single part message, format
message/rfcM.
This sounds like you're talking about encapsulating submissions to
moderators rather than gatewaying them. This breaks almost all existing
moderation software.
I submit the number of moderators is /vastly/ smaller than the number of
people who read e-mail, or read news, or are on a list gatewayed between
them. If the fallout is that moderators need to update their software
I'd say that's affecting the smallest group possible.
They are also people who are likely to update to the latest and greatest
with any news change, as I think they are likely to want new bells and
whistles, or at least be able to understand them as they moderate.
If anything, the moderation could become quite simple, take the multipart I
described above, and send back:
message/multipart
- text/plain
"approve my_password"
- text/rfcM
- The UTF-8 article, 100% unchanged from the first message.
Since the second part is copied verbatim, any MIME tools today could
probably trivially be modified to construct a reply in this format, the
only real issue for the moderator is finding something that will display
the UTF-8 message, but as I see it that's going to be a problem
regardless of the format of the e-mail he gets (UTF-8 raw, UTF-8 in
base64 MIME, some other wacky new encoding), so it's a noop.
I realize it's not quite how it works today (although it's been a
while since I did anything serious with news), but it seems to be a
way to do it that existing tools are 90% of the way to supporting,
and that also in the long run might help move e-mail to UTF-8, which
I have to believe will be a battle at some point.
--
Leo Bicknell - bicknell(_at_)ufp(_dot_)org - CCIE 3440
PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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