🚀 go-pugleaf

In the following, I defend a point of view that I'm not sure I hold
myself, simply for fun.


> > This is a gross hack but it would be of practical benefit to those 
> > people who are in the same position as Alasdair.
> 
> No, it will not be of benefit to such people, at least not in the long
> term.  Such a kludge would do two things:
> 
> 1) Remove the incentive to get the broken gateways fixed.  Once
> established, such an "interim" convention would never go away.

A convention that never goes away?  Hmmm...  Sounds like a solid
standard to me...


> 2) Encourage people to generate messages of this form.  Such messages
> are not in MIME format and will not be interpreted by many correct
> MIME implementations.

I'm not sure if the story went exactly like this, but:  A while ago,
the author of the "make" tool wrote the first version of his program
and distributed it among a few colleagues.  It turned out that he had
made the unfortunate choice of requiring a tab at the beginning of a
line containing the "action" part of the rule.  Some programmers found
this confusing when spaces were rejected by the program.  However, the
author discovered that he had as many as 7 users, so he refrained from
changing the spec.

Look where that got us today.  (I should add, though, that "make" was
a great accomplishment and I use it a lot, like it, etc.)

Now, the fully anticipated reply to this is that there are too many
MIME programs out there _and_ being used already, and that it is
easier to change the "small" number of installations of programs that
violate the set-in-stone MIME spec.  (Though it's still in the
"Proposed Draft" stage.)

Easier?  Easier for whom?  Exactly how many such "broken" and
unupgradable systems are there out there?  How do we know which is
easier to upgrade: the "broken" gateways, or the relatively new
MIME implementations?  It's mostly just a matter of convincing people.

Alasdair, if you feel strongly about this, I suggest you keep pushing,
perhaps even on the MIME mailing list (to join, send mail to
ietf-822-request@dimacs.rutgers.edu).  If people still don't agree
with you, you can still give it a shot anyway, and get the people that
_do_ agree with you to install programs following your spec.  If it is
successful, you have created a de facto standard.  That's the way it
works.

By the way, I think you have pointed out an actual flaw in the MIME
spec (though it has been pointed out before).  I mean, it's a clear
contradiction: Base64 was designed to be transmissible through any
system, but the headers identifying it as such were _not_ designed to
be transmissible.  (I have actually experienced header stripping in a
mailing list server.  I.e. a program that I cannot control directly.)

Disclaimer: I do not represent "juice".  The above are my opinions only.
-
-- 
Erik M. van der Poel                               erik@poel.juice.or.jp