Re: Last Call: SMTP Service Extension for Content Negotiation to Proposed Standard

At 18:45 -0700 on 07/02/2002, Dave Crocker wrote about Re: Last Call: 
SMTP Service Extension for Content Negot:

>  >  the client
>>is being asked to make a convert-or-fail decision without
>>any reasonable (sender-supplied or standardized) criteria as
>>to what kinds of conversions are acceptable.
>>
>>This seems like another major omission in the current spec.
>
>You again seem to be missing the fact that that "omission" predates CONNEG
>and has been part of Internet mail for 8 years.

Fixing/Avoiding that "Omission" it seems to me to be the 
job-of/use-for Multi-Part/Alternate. The Sender creates all the 
Permutations/Combinations they want and sends the total package. It 
is then the job of the Recipient to wade through the mess and select 
the versions that it wants to accept for display/processing.

CONNEG appears at its root to be an attempt to avoid the "wasted" 
bandwidth and processing time/effort to create a M-P/A MIME message 
most of whose content the Recipient is going to ignore after receipt. 
It also removes the requirement that the Recipient is even capable of 
parsing a M-P/A MIME message to locate the "correct" version of FAX 
which it can understand/process.

I apologize if I am stating the obvious but sometimes it is needed to 
do so to refocus the discussion (the "Forest for the Trees" 
Phenomenon).