Attachments? Re: Indented multi-line strings (was: "Data blocks" syntax specification draft)

[Peter J. Holzer]

On 2018-06-02 07:59:07 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 2, 2018 at 7:03 AM, Peter J. Holzer <hjp-python at hjp.at> wrote:
> > On 2018-05-31 14:42:39 -0700, Paul wrote:
> >> I have heard that attachments to messages are not allowed on this list,
> >> which makes sense. However I notice that messages from Peter do have an
> >> attachment, i.e., a signature.asc file.
> >
> > No this is isn't an attachment. It's a signature. Your MUA probably
> > displays everything it can't handle as an "attachment".
> 
> Which, I might point out, is a decent way to handle unknown parts. The
> user is shown that there's an extra part, and can view it as an
> external file.

Which makes very little sense with a signature. By itself it is useless,
it is only useful together with the content part.

I consider this very poor UI design. There are only a handful multipart
types defined in MIME, each with clear semantics. For multipart/signed,
there are basically 2 things you can do if you don't support the
signature algorithm: Ignore the signature completely, or display an
indication that this part is signed but you can't verify the signature
(the latter might also offer a way to pass the entire multipart/signed
to an external program). But offering to view/save the signature alone
is useless and only confuses the user.

(This is especially baffling for programs which already support
multipart/signed, but not the specific signature type. What was the
developer thinking?)

        hp

-- 
   _  | Peter J. Holzer    | we build much bigger, better disasters now
|_|_) |                    | because we have much more sophisticated
| |   | hjp at hjp.at         | management tools.
__/   | http://www.hjp.at/ | -- Ross Anderson <https://www.edge.org/>
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