[Mailman-Developers] email schemas

[John Dennis]

On Thu, 2006-07-06 at 13:29 -0400, emf wrote:

Pardon my top post, these are all good points Ethan, it's clear you've
given it careful thought.

> Another approach would be something like:
> <header><name>To</name> bob at dobbs.org</header>

Yeah, that would work too, but it's a little awkward, I like your
original idea better.

> It also is problematic to have an arbitrary set of tags; I can imagine 
> someone using characters illegal for element names in an X-header.

Good thinking, the legal character set differs between the two RFC's.

> As I understand it, any user agent is free to throw on any X-header 
> their little heart desires, so that strikes me as a lack of a-priori 
> knowledge.

No problem, silently ignore unknown fields.

> > BTW, is the intention this XML document is going to have full blown
> > parsing all the way through all the mime (sub)parts?
> 
> I was angling for something along those lines, yes.

Hmm... then you'll have to introduce the same structure for handling
extended mime types etc., consistency in structural representation is
probably a good thing.

Since you'll going to have to deal with unknown names I think I would
prefer both well known names and unknown extended names have identical
document structure rather than special casing the extended names in an
independent way. Special casing during a document traversal based on
context introduces unnecessary pain.


-- 
John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>
Red Hat Inc.