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Re: Accent escape sequences

A CIF with embedded MIME information is exactly parallel to the multipart/mixed
content.  By using the boundary markers you are then able to unambiguously
deal with all data formats including ones that might accidentally produce
a \n; that could be misinterpreted as terminating the text field.  We
follow this practice in imgCIF and it greatly simplifies the parsing code.
The default of plain text should be the only one without the boundary
marker and at least a Content-Type header.  Think of it as an extended
magic number.   -- Herbert


At 10:33 AM -0500 3/5/07, Joe Krahn wrote:
>Herbert J. Bernstein wrote:
>>  It would be best to use a MIME boundary marker before the MIME header
>>  information.
>>
>>
>...
>If I understand right, the boundary is only for "multipart/mixed"
>content. The actual text then requires an internal Content-Type header.
>If a single text block is being defined, this is just extra overhead.
>
>In looking at MIME specs, even Content-Type is optional, defaulting to
>plain text. The only mandatory item is the MIME-Version header. If one
>defines CIF-text as being assumed MIME, then even this could be left out.
>
>An interesting idea:
>
>The advantage of a simple escape mechanism, like the current scheme, is
>that it is fairly easy to read directly. The disadvantage is that it has
>limited abilities. With MIME, the multipart/alternative could be used,
>where simple ASCII escapes are combined with a more accurate version
>that is not directly readable. This give the advantages of both forms.
>
>Joe Krahn
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