Re: SUMMARY: Running X/Mosaic from behind a firewall
Dave Crocker <dcrocker@mordor.stanford.edu>
Message-id: <9309282136.AA24991@Mordor.Stanford.EDU>
To: Marc VanHeyningen <mvanheyn@cs.indiana.edu>
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: SUMMARY: Running X/Mosaic from behind a firewall
Phone: +1 408 246 8253; fax: +1 408 249 6205
In-reply-to: Your message of Tue, 28 Sep 93 16:22:50 -0500. <695.749251370@hound.cs.indiana.edu>
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 93 14:36:38 -0700
From: Dave Crocker <dcrocker@mordor.stanford.edu>
X-Mts: smtp
Marc,
It's ironic to have been the offendor in suggesting content-type
application, since it turns out that I, too, don't like it very
much -- and for the same reasons as you.
On reflection, I guess that type 'message' is entirely reasonable.
I'd like to lobby against it, however, for two reasons. (This isn't
religion, just a desire to facilitate wide-ranging interoperability.)
1. Type 'message' has turned out to be rather strange. At a minimum,
it suffers the same fate as Application in having no commonality
among the sub-types.
2. A recipient that does not understand subtype 'http' will be
frozen solid if the content-type is 'application' or 'message'. I
would like to find a way for MIME-aware, http-UNaware recipients
to be able to still have some access to the information.
While the original motivation for all of this is to support
program-to-program exchanges, it might seem strange to worry about
handling non-web-software recipients, but it doesn't hurt to allow such
support and it MIGHT help.
Given that almost all of the data are MIME-based, then defining the
subtype to be under Multipart means that the data are still highly
accessible, even for an unenlightened, non-http recipient.
Dave