From bogus@does.not.exist.com Thu Jul 24 13:50:07 2014 From: bogus@does.not.exist.com () Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 17:50:07 -0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: to doubt that they are appropriate for the task that I and Bill might wish that they can do. The most obvious form of optional parameter in MIME is the "charset" parameter. This is defined with the specification of a default value in its absence, but the important feature for it w.r.t. FITS is that when the charset is not the default there is no (easy) way to ascertain it from the body of the message. In FITS we have keywords, and the internet bodies might well ask why we don't simply define keywords whose values tell what sorts of conventions are in use in that file. -- Steve Allen UCO/Lick Observatory Santa Cruz, CA 95064 sla at ucolick.org Voice: +1 831 459 3046 http://www.ucolick.org/~sla PGP: 1024/E46978C5 F6 78 D1 10 62 94 8F 2E 49 89 0E FE 26 B4 14 93