From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Sun Jul 08 2001 - 05:35:54 CDT
Erland Sommarskog <sommar@algonet.se> writes:
> Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:
>> Erland Sommarskog <sommar@algonet.se> writes:
>>> And the point is that we don't want to them to routinely reuse the
>>> MIME-ification stuff they have for mail. I've seen to many mail
>>> messages QP:ing the universe, or even producing Base-64 out of an
>>> ordinary text message. I don't want that crap in news.
>>> The benefit for mail could be that what they rewrite for news will
>>> slip into mail as well.
>> It sounds like you want to change MIME. You're in the wrong working
>> group to do that. ietf-822@imc.org is two doors down on the left.
> I let it suffice trying to keep the worst insanities out of news. Just
> because MIME is there does not mean that we have to use every single bit
> of it.
This isn't what you said. What you said is that you don't like a part of
MIME and think it should be changed in mail as well. This is not
something within the scope of this working group, such as the specific
implications of MIME for netnews. It is something that applies to both
messaging applications of MIME, and as such is a topic for a MIME working
group.
I maintain that if your objections are not *netnews-specific*, they are
best directed to a working group that is not netnews-specific. Otherwise,
they very much look like a backhanded attempt to change MIME without
actually talking to the MIME people by encoding a bunch of restrictions on
MIME into a separate protocol document and then using that as political
pressure.
At the very least, I have to wonder why you're not presenting your
arguments to the people who could actually effect the changes that you
apparently want, and instead are only presenting them in this working
group where none of those people are listening. It feels to me like a
concerted effort to fragment netnews away from mail, something I consider
to be an absolutely horrendous mistake given that we're finally well on
the path towards unification and most of the intolerable (from a netnews
technical perspective) provisions are now removed from or deprecated in
mail as well.
If you find that attitude to be snotty, so be it. I'm not the first
person to try to make this argument with this working group. I just
appear to be the currently most persistant, as many of the others have
given up in disgust.
I would actually be quite happy to see some of these guidelines put into
the next revision of the MIME standard, like "if you have an eight-bit
transport layer available, you SHOULD NOT use quoted-printable except for
those MIME content types that specifically require it." If someone wanted
to champion that position on ietf-822, I'd be happy to second it, and I'm
on that mailing list and quite willing to discuss these issues there.
This is simply the wrong place and the wrong way of handling it.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>