On Thu, 15 Dec 1994, Timothy C. May wrote:
I see two "stable attractors" for text/graphics/multimedia/etc. sent over the Net:
1. Straight text, ASCII, 80 column format. All systems can handle this, all mailers and newsreaders can handle it, it's what the Usenet is essentially based upon, and it gets the job done. It meets the needs of 95% of us for 95% of our needs.
2. The Web, for graphics, images, etc. This will be the next main stable attractor, deployed on many platforms. (I'm assuming the debate here about Netscape standards does not imply much of a fragmentation, that Mosaic, Netscape, MacWeb, etc., will all basically be able to display Web pages in much the same way.)
Okay, I'll go with that. I'd just like to point out that http (transport for documents serverd on the web) uses mime. That's how your browser knows something is html, or a picture of some format, or postscript. find a web server (pick one) and telnet to it: % telnet my.web.server 80 enter the following line and press return *twice* HEAD / HTTP/1.0 (you need the second line because the server is expecting a mime header from you - ended by a blank line). You'll get some answer like: HTTP/1.0 200 OK Date: Friday, 16-Dec-94 01:09:44 GMT Server: NCSA/1.3 MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/html Last-modified: Tuesday, 06-Dec-94 06:10:37 GMT Content-length: 1067 That's the server's answer to your query - one mime header (the http HEAD request asks for info about a document). If you have a mailer that doesn't automagically verify signatures and pack and unpack pgp messages it's a pain (I know tim will agree with this). If you have a mailer that can't pack and unpack mime then it's a pain too. Just because your mailer doesn't support it doesn't mean that mime (or email privacy !) is a bad thing. -Jon PS: for those with macs or pcs or unix machines don't have mime. please take a look at mpack - might find it usefull. ftp://ftp.andrew.cmu.edu/pub/mpack -- j.fletcher@stirling.ac.uk "opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of anyone or anything else."