Re: Enhancing mailcaps for MIME and WWW

davidc@erin.gov.au (David Crossley)

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Maybe in reply to: Marc VanHeyningen: "Enhancing mailcaps for MIME and WWW"

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Date: Sat, 21 May 1994 04:26:19 +0200
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From: davidc@erin.gov.au (David Crossley)
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
Subject: Re: Enhancing mailcaps for MIME and WWW
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On Thu, 19 May 1994 Marc VanHeyningen <mvanheyn@cs.indiana.edu> writes:

> Mailcaps have a great deal of promise as a mechanism for centralizing
> configuration information about handling MIME content-types,
> permitting a variety of programs to successfully handle new items
> with a relative minimum of fuss.  It is assumed that most programs
> will have a (reasonably small) set of content-types they can handle
> directly and will use this file to resolve others.

Can you Marc, or someone else, point me towards some sources of information
about MIME?  I have a basic understanding but will need much more to be able
to contribute to (or even follow) this discussion. 

> Of particular importance to me is the presence of MIME in the WWW
> community, and the desirability of these two bodies of thought to try
> to forge good things together rather than each do different and
> incompatible things, as has happened in a few cases.
> 
> I believe both the mail-based MIME and WWW communities stand to
> benefit from a unified content-type information file which is
> somewhat, but not radically, richer than the present configuration.
> I'd like to find some other people who are interested in doing this
> and hammer out some issues.  

The WAIS community also stands to benefit escpecially with the multiformat
capabilities of WAIS and WWW.


David Crossley - Geographic Information Systems Manager
internet: davidc@erin.gov.au
URL http://kaos.erin.gov.au/erin.html
Australian Environmental Resources Information Network - ERIN