Re: misconceptions about MIME [long]
Luc Ottavj <Luc.Ottavj@sophia.inria.fr>
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 1992 08:46:54 +0100
From: Luc Ottavj <Luc.Ottavj@sophia.inria.fr>
Message-id: <199210280746.AA11955@pegase.inria.fr>
To: NED@sigurd.innosoft.com, masinter@parc.xerox.com
Subject: Re: misconceptions about MIME [long]
Cc: connolly@pixel.convex.com, nsb@thumper.bellcore.com,
wais-talk@quake.think.com, www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
>If I wish to retrieve the document, say to view it, I might want to
>choose the available representation that is most appropriate for my
>purpose. Imagine my dismay to retrieve a 50 megabyte postscript file
>from an anonymous FTP archive, only to discover that it is in the
>newly announced Postscript level 4 format, or to try to edit it only
>to discover that it is in the (upwardly compatible but not parsable by
>my client) version 44 of Rich Text. In each case, the appropriateness
>of alternate sources and representations of a document would depend on
>information that is currently only available in-band.
i think you can avoid this if you make your MIME document descriptor
in the following way.
1- an ascii part containing an abstract for the document and
describing all the document representations (size, real format...)
2- for each representation an external-body ftp part
then the mime document itself is very short and after you read
the ascii part you can decide to transfer( or not )
only the representation that you want
Luc Ottavj | Email : ottavj@pegase.inria.fr
INRIA U.R. de Sophia Antipolis | Phone : (33) 93 65 77 21
2004, Route des Lucioles BP 93 | Telex : 97 00 50 F
06902 Sophia Antipolis CEDEX France| Fax : (33) 93 65 76 02