Re: request for new forms submission consensus

Bill Janssen <janssen@parc.xerox.com>
X-Delivered: at request of secret on dxcern.cern.ch
Message-id: <UgiTo9UB0KGW5Dk78n@holmes.parc.xerox.com>
Date: 	Mon, 11 Oct 1993 17:40:41 PDT
Sender: Bill Janssen <janssen@parc.xerox.com>
From: Bill Janssen <janssen@parc.xerox.com>
To: kevin@scic.intel.com (Kevin Altis),
        henry strickland <strick@osc.versant.com>
Subject: Re: request for new forms submission consensus
Cc: sanders@bsdi.com, www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
In-reply-to: <9310112015.AA29513@osc.versant.com>
References: <9310112015.AA29513@osc.versant.com>

Excerpts from ext.WorldWideWeb: 11-Oct-93 Re: request for new forms s..
henry strickland@osc.ver (824)

> MIME has thought about all these issues and come up with
> *practical* approaches to them.  WWW should use MIME whenever possible,
> even when other approaches are "better" from some points of view.

> MIME has a lot of experience behind it in Andrew, which had 
> lots of hypertextish (www-ish) aspects.  And the internet future
> is MIME.

> It should not be hard to find an extensible way to embed MIME
> in HTML and HTML in MIME.  Notice MIME documents can already 
> have anchor-names in them (Content-Id:), references to
> external documents, etc.

Some things are being confused here, I think.  MIME does not define a
document format, or reflect the experience with the Andrew Toolkit's
(then, ATK; now called AUIS) support for `embedding' in data formats,
particularly in their text format.  Some of us on the MIME list thought
about using MIME and mail headers to form a document format, and it
never came to much.  What MIME provides is a stylized, uniform way of
indicating the format of a mail message; this may also be useful for
specifying the format of a document.  Yes, the multipart has
"Content-Id", but so do many things.  Compound document formats
typically require more powerful infrastructure.

ATK had very little in the form of hypertextish objects; just the
"link", so far as I can remember.  A lot of multimedia aspects, though.

Embedding HTML in MIME should be easy, sure, as it amounts to just putting

	Content-Type:  application/html

in a header, before the actual HTML document.  But embedding MIME in
HTML sounds like a type mismatch.  You might be able to use the MIME
registered types in some fashion in HTML; perhaps that's what you meant.

Bill