on 11/14/2002 11:46 PM Dan Kohn wrote:
However, this raises a question: does *anyone* use external-body in
association with I-D announcements?
Several MUAs support message/external-body, but they don't all work with
the I-D announcements. Specifically, some MUAs only render the entities if
a Content-Transfer-Encoding MIME header field is defined, and the I-Ds
don't define that MIME header field with those entities. The result is
that Netscape, Mozilla and some others don't render those links, meaning
that the message/external-body entities cannot be used by users with the
affected MUAs. This obviously limits usability.
Even though fixing the MUAs would be the best fix in the long-term, adding
the CTE MIME header field to these entities would at least allow more MUAs
to render the entities appropriately. Since this is a mandatory header
field for some entities, there is some argument that the missing CTE is
the problem anyway.
As to the larger question, I'm opposed to replacing the external links
with URLs. There are just as many known problems with rendering long URLs
as there are with message/external-body entities (eg, your example folded
and became unusable in Mozilla). Besides, the IETF should eat its own dog
food, and message/external-body is an important type. Now if we could just
make it work with some of the popular MUAs...
While we're on the topic of troublesome messages from the IETF, it's also
interesting to note that the I-D submission response messages are also
malformed, containing two different Subject header fields:
Subject: Re: draft-ietf-crisp-lw-user-00.txt
Subject: Autoreply from Internet Draft Submission Manager
--
Eric A. Hall http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/