Re: Keywords for "SMTP Service Extension for Content Negotiation"

At 08:55 AM 7/13/02 -0700, [email protected] wrote:
>I think the availabilty of capabilities information has the potential to be as
>important a step as MIME was. As such, I don't begrudge healthy debate about
>how and where it is done. But let's not forget that the development of 
>MIME was
>informed by the catastrophic failure of various other schemes for doing
>multimedia messaging -- some of them more elegant than MIME -- leading to
>compromises in the design intended to insure deployability. I think the
>discussion of where and how to do content negotiation needs to be similarly
>informed by the catastrophic failure of Internet-wide directory services to
>deploy.

(Not to disagree with anything you say...)

One of the considerations informing the UA-driven negotiation design was 
the idea that information obtained from any source other than the final 
recipient was potentially tentative, and that some kind of closing of the 
loop was needed to make negotiation reliable.  The better the initial 
information that is available, the more efficient the 
negotiate-and-transfer process (one round trip).  But incorrect initial 
information doesn't cause the transfer to fail (except possibly for reasons 
of timing).

#g


-------------------
Graham Klyne
<[email protected]>