I guess it's now or never, so let me issue this lament from the crumbling
ramparts of the Net we once knew. :)
The purpose of a Digest, as I have known it over the years, is to save
transmission space and reduce mailbox clutter by collecting a series of
messages into a single, human readable daily "omnibus" with redundant
headers removed. A Digest often functions like a daily newspaper or
journal, with a list of subjects and a neatly formatted body consisting of
that day's articles.
The so-called "MIME Digest" breaks every one of these desirable features
and substitutes a theory-driven mess, apparently so that the people who
invented "multipart/*" can say they found another cool use for it.
* Little or no space is saved, because boundary overhead and repetitive
headers often exceed message content.
* Content often mushrooms in size because instead of just collecting plain
text, it now becomes allowed (and eventually expected) to include multiple
formats (text/html/rtf etc) of each message, plus attendant graphics etc.
* Mailers with explicit support for "MIME Digests" handle them in wildly
disparate ways, so that no vestige of common reading experience survives.
Mailers that do not handle them correctly leave readers with a frustrating
maze of textual passages, all different.
Practically everything the "MIME Digest" does can be done better by
receiving individual messages and routing them to a folder. It is a
solution in search of a problem.
Having been invented, they cannot be uninvented, but it would be a grievous
mistake to "commend" them as the recommended way to go, thus dooming one of
the Net's few remaining areas where readable content actually gets
exchanged by humans.
-- Tom Neff tneff@panix.com--On Tuesday, January 30, 2001 2:54 PM +0000 Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> wrote:
> There is a revision of RFC 1036 underway. You may find various drafts, > and bits of drafts, at www.landfield.com/usefor, and there is a mailing > list (details on that same site) for those who want to get really > involved. I am the Editor of the drafts; Dave Barr is the Chair of the > Working Group. > ...
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