At 16:00 -0400 03-09-25, Keith Moore wrote:
> One of the areas where MIME still, ten years after its
introduction, often fails is when people copy e-mail
messages into the bodies of new e-mail addresses. Quite
often, you see text encoded according to the e-mail heading
rules for non-ASCII characters in the bodies of such
messages.
is that a failure of MIME or a failure to completely implement MIME?
how can the MIME spec (or any spec) solve a problem if implementors
pick and choose which parts they are going to implement?
At 13:32 -0700 03-09-25, Dave Crocker wrote:
This is not a failing with MIME. MIME actually appears to have the right set
of labeling mechanisms.
Sorry, I used the wrong wording. I should have written
"MIME implementations", not "MIME". Of course it is a
failure of implementations, not of the MIME standard. But
it is a problem, and that this problem still occurs, may
mean that IDN will get similar problems for many years in
the future.
(Possibly one could criticize MIME for not supporting more
than one character set within the same body part. I know
that some MIME implementations implemenent multiple body
parts in such a way that not even a line break need be
visible between the body part, but does the MIME standard
specify that it should work in this way?)
The fact that this problem still happens, even if it is
a failure, might be a reason that the MIME standard should
maybe expressly specify that text copied between body parts,
or between header and body parts, should gets its encoding
transformed to the encoding of the target body part.
The main reason for this problem is, in my belief, that
implementors live in the U.S.A. and do not meet this
problem themselves. Making their software work for the
rest of the world is often done by special localization
experts, who work on a tight timescale during a limited
time slot and with not enough input from actual users.
Software will only get well through input from users who
meet special-case problems, and such input from non-
English users is probably not channeled the right way
to the developers.
--
Jacob Palme <jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/jpalme/