On Thu, 2002-01-17 at 17:36, Keith Moore wrote:
It would be difficult for such a thing to happen without the IETF, but
making changes to MIME of any fundamental sort is intensely difficult.
Despite the work I put into RFC 3023, and the very rough consensus we
managed to achieve there, I think XML is demonstrating the limitations
of MIME on a regular basis.
that's a pretty bizarre statement. perhaps it's truer to say that XML
is trying to misuse MIME on a regular basis?
or that expecting the MIME content-type to convey the action that
should be performed by a recipient, rather than a description of
the content, is a bit of a mis-application of MIME?
the fact that XML picked a means of labelling content that is
incompatible with MIME's content-type is hardly MIME's fault.
It's not MIME's fault that it was designed in an era when no one
expected the possibility of creating such labelled content. However,
such content is useful, and MIME's inability to handle such things
definitely feels like a limitation from the perspective of people who
like such things.
Kind of like, say, 7-bit ASCII feels to people trying to use Unicode's
upper reaches.
At what point does it make sense to move beyond MIME?
And is there a way to signal such "moving beyond" so that MIME
applications have fair warning?
--
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com