At 12:24 AM 5/16/00 -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>Well, when we were designing the MIME spec, we went to great lengths
>to cover all the bases - in fact, I've seen one very good use of
>multipart/alternative by somebody with crippling RSI.
>
>He got into the habit of sending commentary to a mailing list as
>multipart/alternative - one part being a *very* brief summary of
>his commentary (usually a sentence or two tops), and the other being
>a message/external-body pointing at a (usually longer) audio file
>that he'd record in greater detail - this was in the days before
>good speech-to-text software.
>
>Yes, it probably violated the letter of the law just a bit, but
>it was certainly in the spirit of it..
Interesting... nothing is new under the sun, etc.
Recently, in considering designs for content negotiation in e-mail, I
considered exactly that model (which is, as far as I can tell, entirely
within the letter of the law). In the end it was rejected for purely
pragmatic reasons -- that proper support for multipart/alternative is not
sufficiently widely available.
(I've just been to WWW9, where one of the themes has been mobile data. One
recurring idea there was the extent to which the problems of mobile data
and accessibility for persons with constrained abilities are, at a purely
technical level, facets of the same problem.)
#g
------------
Graham Klyne
([EMAIL PROTECTED])
