Re: Last Call: 'The APPLICATION/MBOX Media-Type' to Proposed Standard

[Tim Bray <[e-mail]>]

On Aug 10, 2004, at 4:19 AM, Ian Jackson wrote:

> The IESG writes ("Last Call: 'The APPLICATION/MBOX Media-Type' to 
> Proposed Standard "):
>  * Since mbox files are text files (assuming that any binary messages
>    in the mailbox are themselves encoded) and can be read sensibly
>    with the naked eye, the content type should be text/* not
>    application/*.  This will also remove ambiguity surrounding line
>    endings.

I'm not very close to this problem, but I'd like to point out that 
using text/anything gets you into i18n issues... if the server has 
trouble getting the charset= right and doesn't provide it, then the 
rules say the client MUST assume US-ASCII, which in a high proportion 
of cases is going to be wrong; and by the way the client is forbidden 
to use any other heuristics to figure out what the encoding might be.  
text/* also blesses intermediate transcoders which can create all sorts 
of problems.

Maybe these issues don't apply to mbox data, in which case feel free to 
ignore me -Tim

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
[e-mail]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf