Re: I-D ACTION:draft-palme-e-mail-translation-03.txt

--On Thursday, January 17, 2002 11:21 AM +0100 Jacob Palme 
<jpalme@dsv.su.se> wrote:

> (b) multipart/alternative, with an additional first and
>      last body part containing a concatenation of all the
>      translations.

I have another suggestion here based on the MIME pre-amble text you 
sometimes see at the top of MIME messages which is an indicator that your 
client does not support MIME.

Do what you suggestion above, but instead of making the special first and 
last parts a concatenation of each translation, use some descriptive text 
in each of the languages of the other parts explaining that this is a 
multi-lingual alternative MIME message, e.g. (for English):

    This message has been written in different languages. If you see this
    text then your client is not able to automatically select the part of
    the message corresponding to your chosen language. You will need to
    select that part by-hand.

Clients that knew about this new format could auto-select the appropriate 
tagged part and display that. Clients that didn't know about this would 
likely present the first or last part with the descriptive text.

The benefits of this are:

1) The descriptive text in the first and last parts will likely be much 
smaller than the concatenation of the actual multi-lingual parts.
2) Users that see this special message will likely get annoyed by it over 
time and put pressure on their client vendor to have it auto-select the 
appropriate part.

-- 
Cyrus Daboo

Received on Thursday, 17 January 2002 13:34:37 UTC