At 05:58 PM 2002-07-12 -0700, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
>The two
>digest setups exist in parallel because they solve different problems, and
>both sides seem to be fighting as if only one type of digest CAN exist, and
>it MUST solve all problems. Not true. Honest.
Which is why I think that the sympa people made the wrong decision in
supporting only mime format digests, and why the Mj2/Mailman/other people
who made the decision to support multiple digest formats made the right
decision.
The problem is that at least some MLM writers are acting as if there were
only one possible digest format --- and to some extent, I think that they
should have called a "collection of mime message/rfc822 messages" a
"collection" rather than a digest. I suspect that most people think of an
RFC1153 format digest when they think of a digest, and they think of
something else when they get a mime format digest. I wish that the mime
people had called theirs a "collection" or something, and that the MLM
people had decided to allow people to "set collection" to get that and "set
digest" to get the RFC1153 thing.
But they called theirs a digest, and the tendency of mime things in general
is to try and push aside, in an incompatible way, the thing that they
replace that has the same name. It does not surprise me to see that the
Sympa people say, "We are supporting standards, we support the mime digest
as described in RFCxxxx". And then they do not support the RFC1153 thing
because they do not see it as a standard.
But the other reality is that unless you do edit messages, demime them, and
remove attachments, the RFC1153 digests do not scale well. There is no way
to have different messages contain different character sets or to alternate
right to left with left to right messages in the same digest. There is no
way to do different content transfer encoding on different messages. As a
person who does not read a right-to-left language nor one that uses
characters that are not in US-Ascii, I really do not care about these
things. (That's right, I'm selfish and provincial). But they do affect
those who need 8 or more bits per character and more than one direction of
language.
There is no way, really, to issue 1153 digests correctly, unless you sort
by those characteristics and issue separate digests. Maybe you could
encode something in html that looked 1153ish and changed character sets
between messages but it would not be an 1153 digest.
(If people remember, I'd prefer that they edited my name out of the headers
when replying.)
--
"Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of
nature!"
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Nick Simicich - njs@scifi.squawk.com
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