From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Jul 03 2001 - 04:34:15 CDT
In <yld77jvsj7.fsf@windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:
>Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
>> Yes, but in this particular case all the various encodings are a "MUST
>> accept" for all agents, so the implementation effort required with
>> either wording is much the same.
>No, this is not correct. If we simply allow MIME, then one can use
>existing MIME implementations and we know exactly how they work and what
>the issues are from dealing with them in mail. There is therefore no
>additional testing requirements *specific to this draft*, only testing
>requirements that apply to any MIME-compliant software, including mail
>readers. This means that no additional *protocol* testing would really be
>required, as MIME is a well-understood and solved problem.
As it is currently worded, any MIME-correct mail reader that does
newsreading in its spare time will already be partially compliant, which
is a good start.
But generally speaking mail readers have a bad reputation when used as
news readers, so we are asking genuine news readers to try a little
harder. And all we are asking them to do is to detect cases where 8bit
encoding can be used. It is a decision making process. Once the decision
is made, all the existing machinery in the reader can then be used without
change to implement whichever encoding was decided upon.
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5