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

I do not think this will work. When I tested sending
multipart/alternative with different languages in different
body parts, then most existing mailers just showed either
the first or the last body part, without even telling me
that there were any other body parts, or giving me any
option to select a particular body part.

Because of this, my conclusion is that if you use
multipart/alternative with different languages in different
body parts, then the first and the last body parts must
both of them contain a concatenation of all the languages.

Did I correctly understand your proposal?

At 11.31 -0500 02-01-17, Cyrus Daboo wrote:
>--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


-- 
Jacob Palme <jpalme@dsv.su.se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/jpalme/

Received on Friday, 18 January 2002 06:46:25 UTC