- From: Simon St.Laurent <simonstl@simonstl.com>
- Date: 17 Jan 2002 18:49:06 -0500
- To: Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>
- Cc: www-tag@w3.org, ietf-xml-mime@imc.org, mura034@attglobal.net
On Thu, 2002-01-17 at 17:36, Keith Moore wrote: > > It would be difficult for such a thing to happen without the IETF, but > > making changes to MIME of any fundamental sort is intensely difficult. > > Despite the work I put into RFC 3023, and the very rough consensus we > > managed to achieve there, I think XML is demonstrating the limitations > > of MIME on a regular basis. > > that's a pretty bizarre statement. perhaps it's truer to say that XML > is trying to misuse MIME on a regular basis? > > or that expecting the MIME content-type to convey the action that > should be performed by a recipient, rather than a description of > the content, is a bit of a mis-application of MIME? > > the fact that XML picked a means of labelling content that is > incompatible with MIME's content-type is hardly MIME's fault. It's not MIME's fault that it was designed in an era when no one expected the possibility of creating such labelled content. However, such content is useful, and MIME's inability to handle such things definitely feels like a limitation from the perspective of people who like such things. Kind of like, say, 7-bit ASCII feels to people trying to use Unicode's upper reaches. At what point does it make sense to move beyond MIME? And is there a way to signal such "moving beyond" so that MIME applications have fair warning? -- Simon St.Laurent Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets Errors, errors, all fall down! http://simonstl.com
Received on Thursday, 17 January 2002 17:45:32 UTC