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Re: Does anyone use message/external-body?

2002-11-16 20:49:32

on 11/15/2002 4:14 PM Keith Moore 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,



How bizarre.  You mean those MUAs can default to 7bit for other
bodyparts but not for message/external-body?

That's right. They aren't applying the default CTE to the entity headers
inside the message/external-body entity.

And that multiple implementors have made this same error?

Netscape has had this problem since 3.x, and Mozilla still has it
(presumably they are all the same code tree). I seem to remember others
having the same problem but I can't find my testing notes.

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.

The RFC is quite clear that in the absence of a
content-transfer-encoding field it is interpreted as 7bit.

Well, yeah, I don't disagree with the default interpretation. "Some
argument" specifically refers to those times when the docs aren't 7bit
(plenty of examples of I-Ds with 8bit text, despite the rules there too),
which eventually nests into ~it should always be declared.

But I do think it would be an interesting experiment to add the line

content-transfer-encoding: 7bit

to the external body parts of those notices, just to see how many more
MUAs worked with them.

It makes NS/Moz usable anyway.

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/