At 12:24 AM 5/16/00 -0400, Valdis(_dot_)Kletnieks(_at_)vt(_dot_)edu wrote:
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..
Interesting... nothing is new under the sun, etc.
Recently, in considering designs for content negotiation in e-mail, I
considered exactly that model (which is, as far as I can tell, entirely
within the letter of the law). In the end it was rejected for purely
pragmatic reasons -- that proper support for multipart/alternative is not
sufficiently widely available.
(I've just been to WWW9, where one of the themes has been mobile data. One
recurring idea there was the extent to which the problems of mobile data
and accessibility for persons with constrained abilities are, at a purely
technical level, facets of the same problem.)
#g
------------
Graham Klyne
(GK(_at_)ACM(_dot_)ORG)