<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
 
> This is again wandering off topic, but IMO these attempts
> to tie up every last detail are fundamentally misguided.
> We're letting the best be the enemy of the plenty good enough.

For a topic "Internet, email, the IETF, and all the rest"
we are close enough, and you proposed to bet on 2822upd. :-) 

The last time I did this was before IETF 70 proposing to put
2821bis + 2822upd + email-arch into a proper WG to make sure
that they are in sync.

John's point about FWS-in-quoted-string was no nonsense, and
at the moment 2821bis and 2822upd disagree about it.  For
the "F" part it might be "good enough", somebody trying to
use CrLf within a quoted-string of the envelope will learn
very fast that it won't fly.  For HTAB it's less clear, and
it would be nice to arrive at "anything matching FWS means
a single SP if used in SMTP" (or similar, all details for
quoted-pairs TBD, I have proposed text some weeks ago here).

I've no idea what 2822upd will do.  But it's important, some
folks think it is a good idea to introduce the quoted-pair
also in EAI for UTF8-non-ascii only because RFC 2822 has it
for any ASCII.  With IMO ugly effects for mailto-eai, apart
from being completely unnecessary to start with.

> I cannot imagine how the resolution of a FWS issue could
> have an impact on the overall email architecture.

IFF we want normative references to 2822upd in 2821bis and
email-arch the impact is "blocked until 2822upd is ready".

[... procedural subtopic skipped, reply in mail ...]

> It was widely agreed long ago that we botched the 
> versioning in MIME and therefore the version would almost
> certainly never change.

Yes, and it was also almost certain that nobody would dare
touch US-ASCII in MIME part headers.  Unfortunately EAI did
it anyway while not updating the version, claiming that all
uses are strictly limited to the message/global "sandbox".

I don't believe in this assumption, if folks want sandboxes
why can't they play with say javascript instead of email ?

> EAI's change is going to be more... interesting.

+1

>> My impression for message subtypes in RFC 2046 was that
>> message/unknown is actually opaque, to be handled like
>> an application/octet-stream, where B64 is allowed, while
>> multipart is multipart, where only 7bit / 8bit / binary
>> counts, other CTEs only within the multipart.
 
> Not reallly. It was a complex situation, but basically
> what happened was that there was really never intention
> of there ever being any additional message subtypes other
> than rfc822 and partial.

And external-body - for obscure reasons the IETF announce
list still desperately tries to use it, causing my old MUA
to crash when somebody forwarded an announcement "as is".
I never found out what exactly the problem is.  But when a
MIME access type can be erroneously registered as subtype
for about 15 years I guess that folks don't care about it.
  
> I actually proposed message/x400-p2 at one point as a 
> tunnelling mechanism and got roasted for it.

Meanwhile there are a few more message/*, some in need of
updated references (1894 => 3464, 2298 => 3798), apparently
the authors forgot this.  Can I simply suggest this on the
MIME types list, and submit it to IANA after a timeout ?

> I simply haven't had the cycles to participate actively 
> in EAI.

It was a kind of fig-leaf WG, relevant folks hiding out in
their private design-team.  <shrug />

 Frank

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