> > The idea of MIME is that the sender can tell the receiver what he has used.
> > Nothing else.
> Then it's a bad idea. Because it has led to the insupportable situation we
> have now with email. To illustrate:
> I am a new computer user. I go to the store and buy an "Internet ready
> computer" complete with email. I use it to send email to people. They can't
> read my email even though the MIME headers say what I have used, because they
> have different kinds of computers or different applications. These people
> send messages back to me telling me to send them something they can
> understand. But I don't even know what they are talking about (assuming I
> can read their messages in the first place!). I only clicked on "send email".
> What do I know about standards and character sets and presentation forms?
> They can't
> read my email even though the MIME headers say what I have used, because they
> have different kinds of computers or different applications. These people
> send messages back to me telling me to send them something they can
> understand. But I don't even know what they are talking about (assuming I
> can read their messages in the first place!). I only clicked on "send email".
> What do I know about standards and character sets and presentation forms?
Unfortunately, your example is largely fallacious. Here's how it really
plays out in the real world:
I am a new computer user. I go to the store and buy an "Internet ready
computer" complete with email. I use it to send email to people. It works
great 99.99% of the time. But once in a while I get a message that's
unreadable, or send a message to someone who reports that they cannot read
it. I don't know what's going on, so I ask for some help from my service
provider. If they are reasonable they figure out the problem (in my
experience the frontrunner here is foreign language spam); if not I need a
new service provider. For legitimate messages the usual problem is broken
MIME support -- the frontrunner here is AOL in the mix, which doesn't handle
MIME correctly. In *extremely* rare cases the problem is a strange or
unusual charset, usually coupled with a user agent's inability to display
something that's mostly ASCII with such a label. Such cases are usually
correctable by changing configurations somewhere. I never hear the word
"standard" mentioned by anybody, but those funny little labels in the
message were invaluable in making it possible for the support staff to assist
me.
I speak as someone who actively performs technical support of email systems
every single day, so please don't tell me I don't know what I'm talking about.
> The people who designed the original ARPAnet understood these issues. Read,
> for example, the RFCs of Padlipsky, or his book "Elements of Networking Style".
Thank you, I already have. But no maxim is universally applicable.
> Absolutely. In a closed environment, you don't need a public registry.
> In an open environment, you don't need, and should not use, vendor- or
> application- or architecture-specific presentation forms. It's antisocial.
And it is operational reality we can do nothing about. This path leads
to X.400-1984.
Ned
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:51 EDT