Emacs MIME Manual - Interface Functions Go to the first , previous , next , last section, table of contents .
Standards change, and so programs have to change to fit in the new mold.
The traditional way to deal with this is just to update the library functions to parse the new syntax. However, this is sometimes the wrong thing to do. In some instances it may be vital to be able to understand both the old syntax as well as the new syntax, and if there is only one library, one must choose between the old version of the library and the new version of the library. The Emacs MIME library takes a different tack. However, normal programs would not use the functions provided by these libraries directly, but instead use the functions provided by the mail-parse library.