Re: Preferring text/plain over text/html?

[Earl Hood <ehood@hydra.acs.uci.edu>]

On February 8, 2002 at 13:59, "Morse, Richard E." wrote:

> What if the text/plain message is merely a message saying "I'm sorry, but thi
> s
> message cannot be displayed in you mailer.  The actual message has been attac
> hed
> as an HTML message." -- This has happened.

Live with it.

Seriously, this is extremely bad behavior of the MUA.  The sematics of
multipart/alternative is to have each part be reasonable *alternatives*
of each other.  With the example you provided, this is not the case.
The MUA should have not bothered with using multipart/alternative and
just set the main Content-Type to text/html.  The receipient's MUA will
be responsible for telling the receipient if the MUA is unable to
render the data received.

Also, if the main type was text/html and the receipient's MUA was
MIME aware but did not support text/html, it would still show the
raw HTML text.   This is desired fallback behavior of a MIME-aware
MUA when encountering unknown text media types.  I.e.  The MUA
would treat the data as text/plain for purposes of displaying the
message to the user.

IMO, it is unreasonable to have MHonArc try to deal with such
a situation.

--ewh