on 11/15/2002 4:14 PM Keith Moore 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, >> >> > > How bizarre. You mean those MUAs can default to 7bit for other > bodyparts but not for message/external-body? That's right. They aren't applying the default CTE to the entity headers inside the message/external-body entity. > And that multiple implementors have made this same error? Netscape has had this problem since 3.x, and Mozilla still has it (presumably they are all the same code tree). I seem to remember others having the same problem but I can't find my testing notes. >> 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. > > The RFC is quite clear that in the absence of a > content-transfer-encoding field it is interpreted as 7bit. Well, yeah, I don't disagree with the default interpretation. "Some argument" specifically refers to those times when the docs aren't 7bit (plenty of examples of I-Ds with 8bit text, despite the rules there too), which eventually nests into ~it should always be declared. > But I do think it would be an interesting experiment to add the line > > content-transfer-encoding: 7bit > > to the external body parts of those notices, just to see how many more > MUAs worked with them. It makes NS/Moz usable anyway. -- Eric A. Hall http://www.ehsco.com/ Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/