`*8bit' wouldn't look to the future. How about `field:value' as I
don't think it can be mistaken for any of the existing syntax? It
could also occur more than once if future needs arise. `cte:8bit'.
I'm not sure I follow that it wouldn't look to the future. I was
really thinking of "*" as being the start character to indicate the
CTE. So you could have *8bit, *q-p, *base64, whatever. I don't see
many (any) new CTE's being defined, but note that it's not a case of
just copying it into the MIME draft, like every other header; it needs
to be interpreted by mhbuild to perform the necessary encoding.
I was thinking of the next time we want to tweak the syntax having
already used () {} <> [] and now *. We could even add fields for
existing ones, e.g. disposition, rather than have to remember it's {}
versus [] for description.
Well, I'm sympathetic to that view. The problem is, again, one of parsing.
Specifically, let's look at what we have now:
() An RFC-822 style comment. Ignored by everything.
<> A Content-ID header (basically, a message-id token)
[] A Content-Description header. Basically free-form text
{} A Content-Disposition header. One token, followed by
additional MIME-parameters.
The problem here is that with the exception of Content-ID, it's hard to tell
when any of those end; that's why they have closing punctuation. So we can't
really do something like *dispo:attachment because there's no way of adding
the additional MIME parameters you might want to put in there.
Depending on what a future MIME header looks like, perhaps we _could_
extend it with *foo:whatever. I'm willing to punt on that for now.
- We'd switch to a default of 8bit for text/* parts.
Presumably 8bit isn't suitable, e.g. for a long line, whereas
quoted-printable is. That's what I mean by having nmh pick what's best;
it uses the first that can legally cover the content.
I follow you. I was thinking that if the "default" of 8bit isn't suitable,
then mhbuild would fall back to q-p, which should always work (for text,
at least). But if you explicitly specify an encoding in a mhbuild directive
that isn't suitable, that should fail.
--Ken
_______________________________________________
Nmh-workers mailing list
Nmh-workers(_at_)nongnu(_dot_)org
https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers