On Sat, Jun 09, 2012 at 04:29:15PM +0200, Lucio De Re wrote: > > (a) that a phenomenal > amount of effort went into establishing that standard;
Then it belongs on someone's refrigerator, next to a participation award. Bad decisions aren't less bad just because a lot of people worked hard to make them. > (b) that it has been of great service for many years; Are you claiming it is good through tenure, which is obviously a fallacy, or are you actually calling this catastrophe of a standard "great"? > (c) that mailers like Outlook that continue to take liberties with > the MIME headers have facilitated in no minor manner the > ditribution of Trojan Horses This is the technological equivalent of ranting about the September 11th attacks. Are you telling us that ignoring a charset header is going to cause webfs to install malicious software on plan 9? > and (d) no one has > yet found it necessary or advisable to replace the MIME standard with > a better one. Incorrect. I have often found it necessary to remove or ignore the MIME standard, and everyone who has spent any time working with MIME content has found it advisable to replace it with anything -- such as alcohol, suicide, or weeping into pillows. > I grant that back in 1992 one could not have foreseen all the > possibilities that MIME ought to have addressed, but all things > considered, I think the result was little short of miraculous. The only thing that is miraculous is that it works at all. MIME is still on 1.0 because they did such a piss-poor job of specifying their outlandish nightmare they've now realized it's impossible even to improve it at all. Nathaniel Borenstein has admitted in public that it is embarassing to him. MIME is a shitty workaround (badly) designed to cram non-text data into a text-based protocol. Instead of using proper transfer protocols to transfer files, some morons decided to shove binary data into text-based messaging. When the web crowd decided they, too, would like to shove unlikely things into a text based protocol, MIME was the natural answer. It's probably going to be just as impossible to kill MIME as it is to kill all kinds of other entrenched awful things in the IT industry, but don't let MIME's wide distribution fool you. It's a bad standard, written badly, used by bad people to do dumb things. It's best to involve yourself as little as possible with it, and if your life is even marginally improved by ignoring something MIME has to say, have at it.
