--On Monday, 15 May, 2000 18:22 -0400 John Stracke
<francis(_at_)ecal(_dot_)com> wrote:
Vernon Schryver wrote:
The practice of sending both HTML and cleartext of supposedly
the same message reflects very poorly on those who do it
intentionally and on those who cause MUA's to trick others
into doing it unintentionally. Never mind the security
...
So why does multipart/alternative exist?
(i) For those few situations in which there is information
content in a "rich" fancy display form that cannot be rendered
in a weaker form that where it is important to get some idea of
the content through. This is clearly a judgement call on the
part of the sender, but the usual mindless attachment of an HTML
part to a plain-text message (to which I assume that Vernon is
most strongly objecting) doesn't add any more information, just
a bit of formatting that the receiving MUA could probably figure
out from a text message if the developer and user were
adequately motivated.
(ii) For situations in which the meaning of multiple rendering
is presumably the same but the string-content is very different.
E.g., one could in theory send a message out in several
different languages, tagging each, and permitting the receiving
MUA to select the message that best matches the
knowledge/usage/skills of the reader.
Of course, the security issues in the latter case are the same
as those that exist anytime you are handed text in a language
you don't understand and some other text that proports to be an
accurate translation of it.
john