Excerpts from ext.ietf-822: 2-Mar-93 Re: file attachments in MIM.. Rens
Troost(_at_)lorax(_dot_)shears (1199)
I like Laurence Lundblad's name; "disposition". How about:
disposition := "Content-Disposition" ":" location
location := "inline" / "attachment"
Actually, I'm more than a little sympathetic with this. My problem with
it is twofold: 1) What's broken in the MIME architecture that we need
to add a new header instead of using the set of facilities already
defined? 2) If messages are saved to files, or cut and pasted back and
forth, the headers will tend to stick around, in which case the
Content-Disposition will tend to accidentally stick around.
The problem I have with the multipart/attachments thing is, as
proposed, you could not have both attachments and in-line bodyparts in
the same message.
Why not? Consider a message structure like
multipart/attachments
multipart/mixed
text/plain
image/gif
application/postscript
image/gif
application/x-FrameMaker
(Using the convention that the primary part is the *first* part of the
multipart/attachments.) The last three parts (the postscript, first
gif, and FrameMaker doc) are attachments to the main message, which
consists of some text and an image.
Or the following:
multipart/mixed
text/plain
multipart/attachments
image/gif
text/plain, filename="README"
text/x-c-code, filename="generate-image.c"
where the main message consists of two parts, a short note and a
``programming'' package, which in this case consists of a
computer-generated image with two attachments, a README and the code
which generated it.
Bill