On Mon, 15 May 2000 18:22:00 EDT, John Stracke <francis(_at_)ecal(_dot_)com>
said:
So why does multipart/alternative exist?
Well, when we were designing the MIME spec, we went to great lengths
to cover all the bases - in fact, I've seen one very good use of
multipart/alternative by somebody with crippling RSI.
He got into the habit of sending commentary to a mailing list as
multipart/alternative - one part being a *very* brief summary of
his commentary (usually a sentence or two tops), and the other being
a message/external-body pointing at a (usually longer) audio file
that he'd record in greater detail - this was in the days before
good speech-to-text software.
Yes, it probably violated the letter of the law just a bit, but
it was certainly in the spirit of it..
Also, remember that we designed it in 1991 or so - the infamous
Green Card Lottery was still 3 years away, AOL wasn't the majority
owner of several northern Virginia counties, and the concept of
a point-and-drool interface for the masses didn't exist yet.
We designed it for the Internet we were hoping for, not for the
one that we actually got....
Valdis Kletnieks
Operating Systems Analyst
Virginia Tech