Timothy C. May says:
For example, I could spend some number of hours switching from my current mail progam (elm) to some other editor which perhaps better-supported the MIME messages seen here. But if all I got for several hours of using, learning, and becoming comfortable with, say, "pine," was the ability to see an _italicized_ word, or a word in Cyrillic, then I would consider this a poor ROI.
You misunderstand the purpose of MIME. It is a way of standardizing the encapsulation of non-ascii information and references inside of an RFC-822 mail message. It allows you to do things like get cyrillic or what have you, but more importantly, it allows things like recursive encapsulation of your messages inside encrypting transformations, the transmission of attachments allong with documents, mailing HTML, embedding external references in mail (i.e. "Click here to get a copy of my latest program) and dozens of other significant things. MIME and HTML are complementary to each other -- HTTP is one way of transporting HTML, but with MIME you can see a Web page, cut it out, paste it into your MIME aware gee-whiz mailer, and send it to someone who could then treat it just like he was looking at the Web, provided he, too, had a good enough MIME capable reader. You could send out your latest document, in parallel, in postscript and in Word format (or whatever) so that lots of people could read it and prepend an explanatory document describing what the contents were -- some MIME readers will then display the attachment as an icon that you could then drag and drop into an appropriate viewer or printer. MIME is a general infrastructural mechanism for this and more. Its a bit of a toy right now on mailing lists because too many people lack MIME capable readers, but in environments where MIME is universally used it has already taken over and is a fundamental part of the way people do business. Once you've seen a secretary who barely understands anything drag a spreadsheet into a mail message and send it to someone on another continent who, equally ignorantly, just double-clicks on it and then has the spreadsheet program launch, you will understand what the point of MIME is. Without a MIME capable reader you can't do any of these things, of course. Even with one, you might not initially see any benefits because you might be using a mediocre reader or you might not have any correspondants who do snazzy things. However, MIME is rapidly being deployed and is going to be universal within a couple of years. Its not just a silly way to sign your name with a GIF.
Like it or not, we are now in a mostly-ASCII Net environment.
We are in a mostly graphical net environment. Its been seven years since I used a machine (for more than a few minutes) that didn't have a bitmapped display. The Macintosh you are sitting in front of right now knows nothing about ASCII -- its a bitmapped display, not a character generator based display, and it can show whatever font you like. What you are actually saying is that you use a primitive interface into your network service provider rather than, say, SLIP or PPP, and that because of this you are restricted to dumb-terminal type operations on a computer that is far more capable than that. Were I you, I'd get PPP account from Netcom and a POP based mailer to handle your mail reading directly on your Mac. You will no longer have to bitch about downloading your mail to the mac to decrypt it -- you will be able to just drag and drop mail into PGP with the right tools. You won't have to worry about MIME with the right package, either.
The "Display Postscript" standard was an attempt to bootstrap the world to a new standard for document display, and it failed.
Display postscript was for windowing systems. It had nothing to do with document displays per se. I can view postscript just as easily here on my workstation as ASCII. Display postscript was not a document viewer technology but a way of building things like NeXTStep, which did indeed fail -- but thats because X won, and X is in wide use. Perry