laptop MIME.

My home terminal is a $500 laptop running Kermit.  I would
like to be able to read MIME messages on it without having to go and
sell it and buy a $2000 '386 machine running Windows or to carry around
a $10000 unix portable.  That implies some amount of restraint in the
amount of technology brought to bear on the problem.

I'm perfectly willing to type in MIME messages with my own damn fingers
cause it doesn't seem to be much more difficult than getting one or two
headers right and putting in the right kind of markup as needed.  I
don't expect to use any parts of the standard that are too hard to
remember off the top of my head.  I'm not going to recompile every
single news and mail program on the machine, not just yet.

It appears from looking at the sample directory that I'm going to 
need to change the mail->news gateway here to pass through one
more header: Content-type.  I am hoping against all hope that 
that's all I have to do.  I am also hoping that real richtext
mail readers do the sensible thing with whitespace between paragraphs,
because I don't intend to put in little spaceships at the end of
each one.

The one application that needs to be fixed to "do the right thing"
with markup is rn.  If the patches to rn to get it to read MIME
stuff are in any of the kits I will run it.  Otherwise I'll wait.
I suspect that with the terminal here I only get one level of
emphasis (bold, maybe, or inverse video) so the foopy all-singing
all-dancing stuff is right out.  (Actually, no I take that back,
Kermit can be coerced into doing the right thing with ISO Latin-1
so something that gives me that would win too.)

You all can argue all you want about comment nesting.  I just want to
be able to boldface things in netnews.  Once we have that down pat the
next thing to do is to write multipart stuff that has a little bit of
boldface at the top and a reference to an external resource at the
bottom, like a live link to an FTP site, on-line public catalog, WAIS
index, gopher menu, archie search, etc etc, so you can note where
something is in an unambiguous way.  Again, if it's not too huge a
production, I will start posting these out to the net in places
where unambiguous external references are really needed: groups
like alt.wais, comp.archives.admin, and (newly) alt.gopher where
people are talking all the time about something that's somewhere else.
In the fullness of time I want to drag an icon out of my mail message
into my snappy internet navigation tool so that I can find something
that someone else has mentioned and tell someone else that there's
interesting things out there.  

--

Edward Vielmetti, vice president for research, MSEN Inc. emv(_at_)msen(_dot_)com
      MSEN Inc., 628 Brooks, Ann Arbor MI  48103 +1 313 741 1120

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