message/utf-8-headers (was Re: [EAI] Poll for MIME type - revised schedule and details)

[Chris Newman <Chris.Newman at Sun.COM>]

Charles Lindsey wrote on 8/15/07 13:08 +0100:
> 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.

With my former document author hat on, there were two reasons I switched to 
"message" from "text" for that media type.

First, return-of-headers is primarily useful as a correlation mechanism.  It's 
undesirable for a correlation mechanism to be transformed in a way that might 
break the correlation.  Using a text/* type with a charset=* parameter invites 
such transformation of the charset and makes it unclear what's expected of a 
client that's doing correlation (e.g. would it have to support 
text/international-header for all the charsets mentioned in RFC 2049 for 
minimal MIME compliance?).

Second, message headers are fundamentally content related to a "message". 
After discussing it with other MIME experts, we felt the name 
text/rfc822-headers was probably a design error and it should have been a 
message content type.  So the change was deliberate on that front as well.

The inconsistency between naming of the ASCII and international variants of 
this media type is unfortunate, but I felt it was the lesser of evils.

I agree this should go on the issue list to gauge WG rough consensus on the 
topic.

               - Chris



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