ietf-smime
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Re: The "name" parameter

1997-07-25 13:35:33
At 12:05 PM -0700 7/25/97, John Gardiner Myers wrote:
Section 3.2.1 mentions the ``optional "name" parameter to the
Content-Type field''.  Per the MIME spec, the "name" parameter is not
applicable across all content types, it only applied to particular media
types.

Right: application/pkcs7-mime is a media type that it could apply to.

The parameter is obsolete, besides.

I disagree. To quote RFC 2046:

  An additional parameter, "CONVERSIONS", was defined in RFC 1341 but
  has since been removed.  RFC 1341 also defined the use of a "NAME"
  parameter which gave a suggested file name to be used if the data
  were to be written to a file.  This has been deprecated in
  anticipation of a separate Content-Disposition header field, to be
  defined in a subsequent RFC.

The Content-Disposition work has not moved to RFC status yet. Thus, the
"anticipation" is a bit premature.  Note that "deprecated" and "obsolete"
mean different things.

If Content-Disposition was complete, sure, we could make this change, but
given that it is still in flux, I think that leaving name= in the
Content-type here is fine.

In "A proper S/MIME implementation MUST use the MIME types and should
not rely on the file extensions." the word "should" should be written as
"must".

Agree completely.

--Paul E. Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium



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