Nick Simicich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Actually, they really are. For a single part text message with a vcard,
> the top level is multipart/mixed, then inside there is, likely a
> text/plain (or a multipart/alternative) and a text/x-vcard. Since no
> mailer other than Netscape can be expected to know what to do with their
> unregistered attachment, it gets turned into a file by Eudora, for
> example. It really is a unrenderable attachment.
Latest alpha version of Gnus knows how to parse and render VCards. Latest
alpha version of Gnus also has full MIME support (best MIME implementation
by far that I have *ever* seen -- it makes MIME actually not suck) and
support for multipart/alternative and HTML rendering via w3-mode.
I'm with Chuq on this. There are some really bad ideas that people have
implemented on top of MIME (multipart/alternative is one, and I still
think VCards are another), but MIME itself is both here to stay and really
not that bad. A decent implementation makes all the difference in the
world. larsi's support in Gnus convinced me; it's not that MIME sucks,
it's that no one's written a non-sucking implementation.
For example, there's absolutely *no* reason to use the horrid boundaries
that most MIME clients use unless you're intentionally going out of your
way to make the message unreadable for people who don't have MIME. Gnus's
default MIME boundary is:
--=-=-=
Yup. That's it. It's perfectly readable in a plain text mesage, even
more readable than some of the ad hoc ASCII separators that people use.
I'm less convinced of the utility of textual markup, but there again I
think a lot of it has to do with the lack of a non-sucking implementation
that's lightweight enough. I *do* think that putting it out of band in
the headers is the Right Way of handling markup of e-mail and news
messages, since the degredation for people who don't parse the markup is
considerably easier and nicer.
And a lot of the problem with HTML markup is that most of the tools that
use HTML to mark up text messages produce really hard-to-read HTML. It's
possible to do a better job.
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
