At 06:18 AM 11/23/97 -0800, Kent Crispin wrote:
If the mailer does all the work for you, then why argue that mime is
necessary as a part of the OP spec? I don't mean that to be flip; I am
Kent, et al,
One of the problems in this discussion is that we seem to have a collection
of people lobbying hard for a particular position, without having
sufficient technical understanding of the position they are arguing
against. This means that what is really needed is a tutorial, rather than
a debate. Tutorials are fine, but not in the middle of a debate.
In this case, the tutorial is about the basics of specifying MIME usage.
First, "the mailer" does not do all the work for you. When you define a
new kind of data you must specify details about the way MIME is used for
that object, in particular naming the content type and any associated
parameters, as well as the likely need for content transfer encoding.
When the object gets interesting, you also need to specify whether it is
treated as monolithic, with a single MIME wrapper around it or whether it
is separated into pieces, using MIME's Multipart mechanism.
"The work" that mailers can do, now, is that they already have all the code
for parsing and dispatching these issues. If they must support armour,
they must add code for it, yet it is entirely redundant with the services
provided by MIME.
d/
--------------------
Dave Crocker
dcrocker(_at_)imc(_dot_)org
Internet Mail Consortium +1 408 246 8253
675 Spruce Dr. fax: +1 408 249 6205
Sunnyvale, CA 94086 USA info(_at_)imc(_dot_)org ,
http://www.imc.org