Re: [EAI] Poll for MIME type - revised schedule and details

["Charles Lindsey" <chl at clerew.man.ac.uk>]

On Tue, 14 Aug 2007 19:16:48 +0100, Harald Tveit Alvestrand  
<harald at alvestrand.no> wrote:

> Hello folks,
>
> after the discussions both on- and off-list after Chicago, we seem to  
> have reached the following conclusions:
>
> - In the list of MIME types, there are people who see actual technical  
> issues with the MIME types - some are issues of style ("we don't do  
> things that way"), others are issues of perception ("that will make the  
> thing look silly in 5 years"), but they are very real issues that we  
> should consider carefully.

I take it this refers to the naming of what has hitherto been known as  
message/utf8smtp, for which purpose the proposed procedure and poll seem  
fine. And also its method of downgrade needs to get covered in the  
downgrade draft.

As you know, I am unhappy about the decision to have such a new message  
type in the first place, but that is a separate matter which will likely  
come up again in IETF Last Call.

I have one further issue related to MIME types. In the current DSN, where  
only the headers are to be returned, the type used in text/rfc822-headers  
(which is required to be in pure ASCII, of course). In the proposed UTF-8  
DSN that type becomes message/utf-8-headers whereas, for consistency with  
the previous practice, one would have expected it to be  
text/utf-8-headers. So why the change? Downgrading of message/* types is  
messy (especially it it involves using encodings such as Q-P or Base64  
which is not supposed to happen, whereas downgrading of text/* types is a  
well understood practice, using Q-P or Base64 as needed). Existing agents  
would automatically apply that encoding to any text type without looking  
any further.

So why not simply use text/utf-8-headers for this job, probably with a  
charset=utf-8 parameter? Indeed, you might even get away with just adding  
a charset parameter to the existing text/rfc822-headers type - I suspect  
many current MUAs would display that correctly without even realizing they  
were doing anything unusual; but that might be considered a step too far.

Perhaps this needs a new Issue number.

--
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 ;                      
   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: chl at clerew.man.ac.uk      Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9      Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5


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