--On Tuesday, January 30, 2001 7:45 PM +0000 Andrew Gierth
<andrew@erlenstar.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> as far as I can tell, all your objections are objections to the
> behaviour of implementations rather than to the standard itself.
The problem with this is that promulgating the standard will lead to a
further flood of misbehaving real-world implementations. It will come as
small comfort to tomorrow's confused readers, as they wade through an
increasingly bandwidth-hogging mishmash of wired-together messagelets in
place of today's elegantly readable Digests, to know that the decisions we
took were THEORETICALLY justifiable.
> Specifically:
> Tom> * Little or no space is saved, because boundary overhead and
> Tom> repetitive headers often exceed message content.
>
> Boundary overhead can be minimised if needed; the boundary for a MIME
> digest can be, as Charles pointed out, the same sequence of 30 -'s
> that is otherwise common. On the other hand, it can equally well be
> a simple "--8=--"....
Yes, it CAN be minimised, but there is no INCENTIVE to minimise it,
therefore applications do not tend to minimise it now and will NOT minimise
it in future. Readers here know as well as I do that after widespread
adoption of "MIME Digests" there will be fifteen separate X-Wonk9-Hdr:
additions from Microsoft and company, and the leading mailers will either
preserve them or add to them.
...
What I am saying is that "MIME Digests" do not solve any problem that
particularly needed solving, and they introduce additional risks that bid
fair to make mail/news life worse for the average Internet user. And that
satisfies my working definition of "harmful."
> Tom> Practically everything the "MIME Digest" does can be done better
> Tom> by receiving individual messages and routing them to a folder.
> Tom> It is a solution in search of a problem.
>
> no. It's clear from the evidence that digests are something that some
> people want to use, and having a standard format for them is clearly
> preferable to having a bunch of incompatible ad-hoc arrangements.
Time out - there is no question that DIGESTS (real Digests) are useful,
people love them. There is no matching evidence I'm aware of that
mail/news users particularly wanted "MIME Digests" to begin with, or that
they are terribly enamored of them now - it's simply the way some key
pieces of software are configured to go by default.
-- Tom Neff tneff@panix.com************************************************************* To unsubscribe send a message to majordomo@faqs.org as
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