From: Henry Spencer (henry@spsystems.net)
Date: Wed Jul 07 2004 - 14:00:31 CDT
On Tue, 6 Jul 2004, Bruce Lilly wrote:
> > ...Why not simply use the existing message/news for this purpose ?
>
> Because there is a just-send-8 faction that wants to include unencoded,
> untagged 8-bit cruft, which isn't permitted in message types, but is
> permitted in application media types. It's a not-so-hidden agenda. It
> is a remnant from earlier I18N discussions, which were supposed to have
> been relegated to document #4.
It's not that simple, Bruce.
If you review the history of application/news-transmission, you will find
that it first appeared in son-of-1036... which demands proper tagging and
encoding, and flatly forbids just-send-8 in news articles (except in
cooperating subnets, of course). The just-send-8 crowd may like it for
their own reasons, but that wasn't its original motivation.
The problems with message corruption by mail systems go beyond just 8-bit
characters, unfortunately. The *only* way to be positive that stuff, even
stuff composed entirely of printable ASCII, will get through mail totally
intact is base64 encoding, which is why son-of-1036 strongly recommends
using that with application/news-transmission.
> Media type message/rfc822 works just fine; message/news isn't necessary...
*Now*, that's true, because the definition of message/rfc822 has smartened
up over time.
> N.B. "News". Aside from the just-send-8 agenda, application/news-transmission
> is indistinguishable from message/rfc822.
Not correct, in about four different ways.
Henry Spencer
henry@spsystems.net