[JDEV] A piece of MIME? (possible alternate solution)

[Jeremie]

> Attached is a exerpt from my MIME document. It's still very raw, but I
> believe the concepts are understandable. It is horribly full of useless
> comments. CHEW ON THIS!

I've read over the proposal, and I think I understand what you are getting
at and the need for MIME, but I'm not sure about the approach :)

I'm all for figuring out how to include the necessary MIME functionality
in Jabber.  IMHO I don't think we need the full capabilities of MIME, just
the aspects that allow the encapsulation of alternate forms of the textual
content, text/*.  Anything beyond text/* isn't appropriately expressed
within an XML stream anyway, and best left to file transfers.

Of course, all of the encapsulated data is still appropriately escaped for
XML so that conflicting tags aren't processed.

What about a compromise?  What if (as I think was suggested by Patrick) we
include an optional tag that can be embedded within a message, for
instance:

<message>
  <to>guru</to>
  <say>This is BOLD!<mime type='text/html'>This is &lt;B&gt;BOLD&lt;/B&gt;!</mime></say>
</message>

This doesn't require any changes to the main protocol and will work with
non-supporting clients.  Basically, it's a way to express alternate forms
of the same content, multiple <mime/> sections could be included in one
<say/>, each with a different form of the content.

Is this approach workable?  Is there a middle-ground here?

Jer