support of default document names

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Date: Fri, 25 Feb 1994 13:50:22 --100
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From: altis@ibeam.jf.intel.com (Kevin Altis)
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
Subject: support of default document names
X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas
Content-Length: 1096

Currently, there is no standard way to determine a default name to use for
a document retrieved on the Web. Clients prompt the user for a filename or
make up some temporary name that doesn't correspond to the original item.
This makes saving a document more difficult than it needs to be. In
addition, servers send the Last-modified information for a document, so why
not the document name as well. The "path" part of an URL is supposed to be
opaque to the client, though we could obviously use the element after the
last slash as a default name, this certainly won't work once we have URNs,
which will be opaque. The simple solution would be to follow the MIME
Content-Type addition of "name=" in the HTTP server response, so that
instead of a response like:
        Content-type: image/gif
a server would return:
        Content-type: image/gif; name="test.gif"

This works for multi-part MIME messages, and also allows the server to send
other Content-type information back to the client such as those described
by Tony Sanders at <http://www.bsdi.com/HTTP:TNG/MIME-ClientProfile.html>.

ka