Re: multipart/alternative extension

> On 5/7/01 at 2:53 PM -0400, Keith Moore wrote:

> >With multipart/choices there is still potential for information loss,
> >because some clients fail to follow the specs regarding treatment
> >of multipart/unknown.

> I've never known any implementation that actually throws away pieces
> of a multipart/unknown. But even if there were such a beast, one or
> two occurrences of actively broken software would not prevent any
> server from trying to send multipart/unknown when the vast majority
> of clients out there deal perfectly reasonably with it as
> multipart/mixed.

I've seen such implementations, but not any time recently. A couple of
them appeared right after MIME first came out. For some reason people
just couldn't get their head around the generic nature of multipart and
the notion of falling back to multipart/mixed.

The implementions I remember that did this were mostly gateway sorts of things,
and given how the landscape has changed I suspect they are extinct. But
it is always impossible to be sure about stuff like this.

				Ned

Received on Monday, 7 May 2001 16:43:16 UTC