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On Sat, 26 Apr 1997, John C Klensin wrote: > On Sat, 26 Apr 1997 14:39:05 -0700 Dave Crocker > <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > > Anyhow, I don't think there's a problem with the mime model merely, > > as you say, a need to be clear about how it works. And how it works is > > that dispatching to a content-knowledgeable application is done by MIME > > content type/subtype and not by use of parameters. > > But that is an artifact of popular implementations, not a > consequence of the specification. Unless I've missed > something in my most recent reading, it doesn't say a word > about what is used for dispatching and what isn't. And I > guess that is the point I was trying to make. Here is just some practical example of where and how parameters are actually used to select an application. It is the simple task of displaying plaintext mail. The parameter is the "charset" parameter indicating the character encoding. On a UNIX/X11 system, to display something with text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 you might call a terminal emulator with something like xterm -fn *-*-*....*-iso-8859-1 -e more $? and likewise for many other values of "charset", but where in some cases, you have to map from the "charset" parameter to the glyph encoding part of the font name. However, for Japanese, which comes in as text/plain; charset=iso-2022-jp you would have to use something like kterm -e more $? for Chinese, you would have to use cxterm, hanterm for Korean, and other xterm extensions for e.g. Arabic or Hebrew. Of course, there might be a terminal emulator that can display all kinds of scripts just by using some parameter settings, but that's not how things are working currently. Regards, Martin.