ietf-822
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Re: Why do MIME imlementations sometimes fail

2003-09-27 08:29:39

JP> (Possibly one could criticize MIME for not supporting more
JP> than one character set within the same body part.

You may have noticed that the process of creating standards -- or, for that
matter, any engineering design process -- requires making compromises.

The possibility of allowing fine-grained changes in the type of the data was
considered for MIME.

And in fact, it's still possible.  Nothing stops Jacob or anyone else from
defining a new type of body part that supports text of multiple character
encodings.  The challenge is in making it technically sound and enough of a
win over HTML (which is already widely supported) that people want to 
implement it and use it.  

Good luck to anyone who wants to try!

Keith