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attachments? enclosures?

1993-02-10 20:35:39
I'm wondering how to handle the case of a message that has enclosures. 
That is, there is one message which is meant to be presented to the
user, and there are one or more attached documents which are provided
for the user to look at if she desires, but which are not intended to be
automatically presented to the user.  (Typically this would look like a
mail note with a couple of icons at the bottom.)  None of the multipart
subtypes seem appropriate, due to the primacy of the `main' message, and
the strong implication that all parts of those multipart subtypes are
(let's be careful here, thinking of `alternative') eligible for
presentation.

This is not a rare occurrence; often a set of documents is mailed with a
cover note, and it is necessary to distinguish the cover note from the
set of documents.  I suppose one solution is to use `multipart/mixed',
with the primary note being the first part, and the set of documents
contained in the next part as another part of type `multipart/parallel'.
 I don't quite see how to maintain the implicit hierarchical nesting of
the parts, though.  I can also imagine a form of mail document format in
which some parts of a multipart message would be sent solely for the
purpose of being referred to, by referential markup in some other parts
of the multipart message.

I suppose one solution is to say that this is the domain of the markup
format used for the `main' part, and that instead of using MIME to
accomplish the purpose, one should construct a multipart document
format, and mail the entire bundled document set as a single-part
message of type `application/x-compound-document-format'.  But somehow
this seems like an unsatisfactory answer from the MIME perspective.

Bill

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