No subject

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
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