[JDEV] A piece of MIME?

[Scott Robinson]

Interleaved response.

Scott.

* Patrick McCuller translated into ASCII [Tue, Aug 10, 1999 at 07:26:17PM -0400][<018701bee387$beb6e560$1b76c897 at scylla>]
> 
> 	Scott, please don't implement anything like this. I glanced over this:
> 

Oh god no!

> 	I don't want to reply to this in detail before I can respond to Jer's
> documents, but you do realize you're not using MIME, don't you? Have you
> read the MIME rfcs? Mangling out the type specification into the XML makes
> it not only NOT MIME, but REALLY FRAGILE as well.
> 

As I stated, it was _very_ rough but gave an idea for what I am aiming for.
It needs a _lot_ of work to become a MIME-workalike... however I've weighed
the various options on how to use MIME within Jabber and "mangling" our
specification was the only way I could be slightly happy with. (I'm not
anywhere near happy.)

> 	Please consider just putting the MIME block in the message, not screwing
> with the message packet protocol itself unless where neccessary.
> 

Placing a MIME block in the message is a working solution. Let me paste in a
paragraph from my essay:

Creating an extension "<MIME>" tag, while appealing, has a problem. Placing
the MIME'ed text straight into the tag could potentially cause conflicts
with the XML. While I am probably (hopefully) wrong on this problem, I have
yet to see any solutions to the problem if someone places "</message>" within
their "jab". This also applies to standard messages. One could place a
"hack" where all data is BASE64'ed or UUENCODED, but this is ugly in it's
own right. Also, this would require including a entire MIME decoding
engine when we already have an XML engine. Wouldn't it be nice to use what
we already have? Finally, the advantages of "multipart" and forwarding
Jabber messages verbatim would be killed. (or at least crippled)
--

Wow, I really needed to get some sleep. Forgive the grammer and horrible
layout.

> 	You also don't have to worry about XML tags within the message block unless
> they're CDATA Section end tags. This you SHOULD worry about and it should be
> encoded in some way. Jer should probably attach a memo on this to the
> protocol spec.
> 

Oy.

> 	Q: are multiple <say> nodes allowed in the current protocol?
> 
> 
> Patrick
> 
> <-- Here is an example for MIME -->
> <-- Notice the modifications the <message> tag? A server should only _parse_
>      empties (like above) and message/jabber's. There may be mod's for other
>      message types later. -->
> <-- I've also added a few tags: <date>, <bcc> -->
> <message type="message/jabber" length=2382>
>         <to>jeremie</to>
>         <to name='Richard Stallman(On Mountain)'>rms at gnu.org</to>
>         <to name='DSN Network Administration'>root at dsn.net</to>
>         <bcc>billg at microsoft.com</bcc>
>         <thread>World domination</thread>
>         <priority>1</priority>
>         <subject>This Linux Fad...</subject>
> 	<date>Tue, 10 Aug 1999 15:16:54 -0700</date>
>         <-- A normal MIME "mailer" would ignore this equivalent. We should,
>              of course, pay attention to it. Add it to a "description"
>              or something... but we should standardize on it being the
>              first. Or at least have a tag. <say description>? -->
> 	<-- How are we handling whitespace anyway? -->
>         <-- I don't have the put the length because there is no chance of a
>              conflict. What would happen if some evil user put the text
>              "</say></message>" in their plain-text message? What if
>              somewhere it isn't escaped properly? -->
>         <say type="text/plain">This Linux fad is _killing_ us.
> 
>               rms, didn't we tell you to handle these weirdos?
>               They seem to be worshipping you as the free software god!
>               See if you can gain over this Linus character in the polls.
> 
>               This is a MIME-encoded message. If your Jabber client cannot
>               understand MIME, ClientOfChoiceWithNoSpaces is a working
>               alternative.
>         </say>
> 	<say type="text/html" encoding="utf-16" length=610>
>                  <HTML>
>                  <BODY>
>                  <CENTER>This Linux fad is <ITALIC>killing</ITALIC>
> us.</CENTER>
>                  <P>
>                  <A HREF="mailto: rms at gnu.org">rms</A>, didn't we tell you
>                  to handle these weirdos? They seem to be worshipping you as
>                  the <A HREF="http://www.gnu.org/">free software</A> god!
>                  See if you can gain over this <A
> 
> HREF="http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~ui161ab/www/Pinguin/pengo.jpg">
>                  Linus</A> character in the polls.
>                  </BODY>
>                  </HTML>
>         </say>
>         <say type="message/jabber" length=218>
>                  <message>
>                           <to>scott</to>
>                           <subject>Look at this URL!</subject>
>                           <say>http://www.linux.com/</say>
>                  </message>
>         </say>
> 
> 
[snap]