Re: draft-ietf-impp-cpim-msgfmt syntax

At 12:11 PM 11/7/02 -0800, Dave Crocker wrote:
>Jon> That much said, now that DateTime is done,
>
>date/time format has been problematic for a few decades.  i don't know
>whether the cpim format is an improvement over the work that RFC 2822 did.
>For that matter, there have been one or two other efforts.  At any rate, it
>certainly is a topic worthy of independent consideration.

FWIW, datetime was not new work, just a trimming back and repackaging of 
work that absorbed considerable effort several years ago in another WG, but 
never made it to fruition because of non-consensus over the bits that we 
subsequently cut out.  Chris Newman did most of the heavy lifting on the 
original document.

Concerning msgfmt:  My personal preference would be to use an XML-based 
format, and some time ago I did draft that has now expired [1].  I think we 
discussed that before, and the WG members could not agree on that course, 
so I have proceeded in support the consensus of the group.  (It's worth 
noting that this proposal uses a combination of XML and MIME 
multipart/related, to overcome the binary data issue.  But the use of MIME 
is limited to packaging, and message metadata is all in XML content.)

There were a number of reasons that we felt, at the time, that straight 
RFC2822 wasn't quite enough:
the reasons are outlined in section 1.2 of [2].  (These reasons being some 
that I feel make use of XML seem more appropriate, as indicated in the 
introduction section of [2].)

#g
--

[1] 
http://www.ninebynine.org/IETF/Messaging/draft-klyne-message-rfc822-xml-03.txt
     [I just noticed, Dave cited that too]

[2] http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-impp-cpim-msgfmt-07.txt



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




  [reminder: [email protected] for non-technical discussions, please]