From: Jean-Marc Desperrier (jean-marc.desperrier@certplus.com)
Date: Mon Jan 07 2002 - 11:15:19 CST
Claus Färber wrote:
> MIME is 8 years old by now. Still, you obviously use software that
> still does not support it (see the attribution line).
The biggest problem of MIME support in the past was not that MIME was too
complex to decode, but that most programmers had no idea about how what to do
with the data if it's not in the defaut system encoding.
If it had been just a matter of decoding, it would have been everywhere rapidly.
Thinking about MIME leads to think about what to do about foreign charsets, and
finding a solution for that was beyond the knowledge/possibilities of the
average programmer, so I think that why in many case support for MIME was
delayed "until I can find a good solution for those cases".
There's more and more support for i18n in softwares, I don't believe there will
so much acceptance for inertia on this point in news during the next 8 year as
as been the case for mail in the last 8 years.
Nowadays most OS comes with utf-8 support, so the programmer has an easy
solution : "just convert to utf-8, and let the system handle the utf-8", and I
believe there will be in the next 8 years much less acceptance anymore for this
kind of problems.
> 3. A user is not able to followup to an article cross-posted to
> the newsgroup.[2,4]
> [2] - Netscape Communicator 4.73 (de, Win32): "Die Kopfzeile für
> Diskussionsforen ist ungültig" (~ Invalid Newsgroup
> header)
> - Mozilla 0.9.7: crash
Crash ?
Older Mozilla did not crash, if this is the case for 0.9.7, it's a strong
regression and really something that should never happen.
I'll test that and fill bug if needed.