Comment on new text introduced into -13. The text in a new
bullet in 6.3 says
> o MIME's [RFC2045] and [RFC2046] allow for the transport of
> true multimedia material, which has obvious applicability
> to internationalization.
It is not obvious at all. MIME does three things:
(i) It changes the email model from "message plus
attachment" to multiple body parts.
(ii) It provides a way to label textual messages with
character set and language information.
(iii) It provides a way to handle multimedia content.
These three are really independent of each other in the sense
that any one of them without the other two. Absent one of the
originally-anticipated uses of multipart/alternative, which has
never taken off for that use, the first is much more closely
related to the third than the second and is, indeed, almost
irrelevant to the second.
The assertion of obviousness is also unnecessary. The
provisions in MIME for identification of charset and language
are, very specifically, internationalization provisions. The
necessary and sufficient text for the bullet item is simply
something like
o MIME [RFC2045] provides for the identification of
coded character set ("charset") information and, if
desired, language information, which directly support
internationalization.
In addition, the last bullet reads
> o POP and IMAP do not introduce internationalization issues.
If that were true, the EAI work would not require special
specifications and treatment for POP or IMAP.
And, finally on this subject, with those three new bullets, the
"Hence" at the beginning of the last paragraph of that section
no longer makes sense, if it ever did.
john
p.s. It is incorrect to infer from my willingness to try to help
with this document and correct either the type of small errors
identified earlier or the larger ones identified above that I
have dropped my broader and more conceptual objections to the
document or to advancing it onto the standards track.
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