on 11/14/2002 11:46 PM Dan Kohn wrote: > However, this raises a question: does *anyone* use external-body in > association with I-D announcements? Several MUAs support message/external-body, but they don't all work with the I-D announcements. Specifically, some MUAs only render the entities if a Content-Transfer-Encoding MIME header field is defined, and the I-Ds don't define that MIME header field with those entities. The result is that Netscape, Mozilla and some others don't render those links, meaning that the message/external-body entities cannot be used by users with the affected MUAs. This obviously limits usability. Even though fixing the MUAs would be the best fix in the long-term, adding the CTE MIME header field to these entities would at least allow more MUAs to render the entities appropriately. Since this is a mandatory header field for some entities, there is some argument that the missing CTE is the problem anyway. As to the larger question, I'm opposed to replacing the external links with URLs. There are just as many known problems with rendering long URLs as there are with message/external-body entities (eg, your example folded and became unusable in Mozilla). Besides, the IETF should eat its own dog food, and message/external-body is an important type. Now if we could just make it work with some of the popular MUAs... While we're on the topic of troublesome messages from the IETF, it's also interesting to note that the I-D submission response messages are also malformed, containing two different Subject header fields: Subject: Re: draft-ietf-crisp-lw-user-00.txt Subject: Autoreply from Internet Draft Submission Manager -- Eric A. Hall http://www.ehsco.com/ Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/