[Info-vax] multipart-alternative [was: Portable OpenVMS binary data format?]

[George]

norman.raphael at ieee.org <norman.raphael at verizon.net> wrote:
> [-- text/plain, encoding 7bit, charset: utf-8, 25 lines --]
> 
> 
>  > -----Original Message-----
> 
>> From: Steven Schweda via Info-vax <info-vax at info-vax.com>

To Norm, concerning multipart-alternative:

I recently started using tin on Linux again, and your posts here
have been giving me fits.  Oddly, don't recall having the
problem before, but maybe its defaults - or those of info-vax -
have changed.

I at first thought it was some kind of exploit, but it was
just the MIME support in this text-only newsreader.  For your
"mutipart-alternative" messages, it first pops me into a
text viewer (less) for the first alternative/part, then into
a browser (essentially lynx) for the second.  All use single
character controls; and Unix being Unix, the character meanings
vary radically from one tool to the next (lynx is especially
idiosyncratic).

And it asks me if I want to save a copy of the attachment
in each case.

I won't go into why the client is configured that way by
default - it doesn't have to be - but just so you know that
some of us have problems with multipart-alternative, and
it's probably fair to say that most of us don't want html
format at all.

George