Tim Legant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> Playing at psychologist for a moment, I would suspect that if
> someone is going to the trouble of providing a native language
> translation, say, for incoming mail from .de domains, they would
> want that first, then the English.

Yup, it's hard to say.  I'd like to hear from some TMDA users who do
use multilingual templates.  I'll probably ask on -users if noone else
responds here.

> On the other hand, if we can support letting them configure it, I'm
> all for that.  Then we don't have to guess.

The reason I asked is because I'm trying to decide how literally to
follow RFC 1892, which is what I'm considering using for the new
MIME-based auto-replies.

The RFC recommends use of a multipart/alternative construct to hold
alternative versions of the same information.  In our case, the report
would be say a confirmation request containing 1 to N translations of
the instructions.  multipart/alternative is perfectly suited for this
because it would allow the user to select the language he wants to
read instead of having all the translations listed sequentially.

The problem with multipart/alternative though for translated texts is
that the sender can't control which version the recipient will see by
default.  That's controlled by the recipient's MUA.  The rule (rfc
2046, section 5.1.4) says user-agents should choose the LAST part of a
type supported by the local environment.  Well, my environment (a
MULE-ized XEmacs) supports practically every charset out there, but
that doesn't mean I can read most of those languages.

This means if a TMDA user wants to include both German and English
templates, and show German by default, it will have to be inserted in
reverse order: English, then German.  However, this means non-MIME
mail readers will not see German first because the English is there
first.

So, there seems no way to control this using multipart/alternative.
What I thought of doing instead is use a multipart/mixed MIME part.
This way the recipient will see the templates in the order the sender
intended.  The downside being that every recipient will have to look
at every language included.

Thoughts?
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