ietf-822
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Re: Multipart/Mixed and Compound Documents

1993-03-19 12:22:02
Excerpts from ext.ietf-822: 19-Mar-93 Re: Multipart/Mixed and Com..
Nathaniel Borenstein(_at_)thu (1232*)

The capability to include objects such as pictures and audio right in
the middle of a paragraph is kind of neat, but it isn't clear that it is
tremendously important.  I, for one, don't care much if such data
doesn't look exactly that way when read by non-Andrew MIME readers.  I
wonder if anyone does?

As always, I hope you're kidding, but experience teaches me that you're
probably not.  I care!  This is especially important for some kinds of
objects such as hypertext references or footnotes or active buttons. 
Other kinds of objects often are traditionally put in their own
paragraph, such as big images or diagrams, but the ability to treat them
as spans of text (and thus apply operations such as centering) is a very
nice and well-designed part of the Andrew text object.  In addition,
people keep coming up with clever things to do with small in-line images
and animations.

But of course, the answer is easy:  Content-type:
application/andrew-inset.  It probably would be useful to have
application/andrew-text broken out as well (or perhaps text/andrew; I
find text marked-up with Andrew markup easier to read raw than text
marked up with richtext markup).

Bill