I understand the alternative. The problem is that we've decided to go with MIME
in the protocol; mailcaps are how MIME is traditionally supported in clients; if
we don't allow image/* etc. we do not do true mailcaps and we lose compatibility
and compliance with the MIME/email world, one of the reasons we used MIME in the
first place.
You are correct about the problems with image/*. However, as a server
maintainer, you shouldn't need to care. If a client doesn't think it can handle
any form of image, it shouldn't ask for image/*. If it *does* -- and keep in
mind that I may have an external image 'viewer' that is perfectly capable of
saving formats it doesn't understand to disk rather than just puking, so I as a
user can go get a suitable viewer at my convenience (*if, as a user, I wish*) --
then the server should just say "Well, OK, here ya go."
As a result of the problems that have arisen with pre4, btw, I'm going to not
use any wildcards in the default Mosaic mailcap stuff -- image types will be
elaborated, etc. and so wildcards will never come into play unless someone
specifically wants them to -- however, I am arguing in favor of (a) compliance
with the spec and the rest of the world [which I think is a Big Deal] and (b)
allowing users to do what they want on the user/client end.
> There. Purely from the view of a server maintainer: I put in a lot of
> working getting our server to do conversions automatically! :-)
>
> Repost this to the list if you want a discussion; I thought I'd just
> send to you because the noise in www.talk is too much right now :(
Cheers,
Marc