Re: Message Attributes (considered harmful)

[Laird Breyer <laird@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Dec 16 2004, Keith Moore wrote:
> 
> and I'm inclined to think that annotations added to a message after 
> delivery really don't belong in the message header.  we want to put 
> things there because it's easy to do so, not because it makes good 
> sense.

>From a practical point of view, I think this is debatable. 

It's certainly possible to create a new MIME type for each envisaged
piece of information, but practically message headers have a privileged 
role. 

1) They are easy to find without parsing a complex MIME structure.

2) They are often available in cases where the actual body isn't
directly available.

3) They are intended for meta information about the message rather
than message content per se, so it could be argued that they are the only 
correct place to add annotations which describe aspects of the message
rather than new content.

-- 
Laird Breyer.