[92437] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Removal of my brain
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu)
Wed Sep 20 18:59:47 2006
To: Todd Vierling <tv@pobox.com>
Cc: "billn@billn.net" <billn@billn.net>, nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 20 Sep 2006 16:23:46 EDT."
<f13ed07b0609201323g1f3fe1a8kffe65ce7d873fc66@mail.gmail.com>
From: Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2006 17:04:53 -0400
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
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On Wed, 20 Sep 2006 16:23:46 EDT, Todd Vierling said:
> Which is just one of the reasons that the MIME type
> "multipart/alternative" exists. Sane MUAs that wish to send HTML also
> send a text/plain alternative segment in the same MIME stream.
Vernon Schreyer made a very good point years ago that multipart/alternative
is fundementally busticated, because there's two options:
Option 1: The actual information content of both the text/plain and text/html
is identical. Sending the html is therefor superflous.
Option 2: There is added crucial semantic content in the HTML (links, table
formatting, etc) that is not representable in the text/plain. At that point,
sending the text/plain is *also* incorrect, as it allows the receiving MUA to
punt and provide an incomplete and incorrect version of the information. Sending
just the text/html and requiring the receiving MUA to do the downgrading with
more precise knowledge of the exact non-representable brain damage is the
correct behavior here (for instance, some MUAs are able to provide clickable
links after filtering to text/plain, but unable to do proper table alignment).
Similar ideas are included in RFC4141, where the receiving end provides info
on what can/cant be displayed.
In either case, sending both plain and html versions is boneheaded and wrong. :)
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