McCoy is Right! New Mail Format to Start Now.

[Jonathon Fletcher]

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 at stirling.ac.uk
  "opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of
   anyone or anything else."