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- Is there any reason that the body of a message/external-body entity
has to be outside of the top-level message? If not, then what is the
right way to handle it ?
Here is an additional issue relating to this question.
My understanding of the spec is that content-id is a required header for the
message/external-body. This is provided for "caching" purposes. Is the
content-id header part of the message/external-body headers or the encapsulated
message headers? The spec seems to indicate that content-id is part of the
message/external-body headers.
This seems kind of strange to me since it causes caching to be associated with a
specific reference to the external body rather than to the external body itself
(which might have multiple references within a message and across different
messages).
This was discussed by the group some months ago with several people touching
on
the use of content-ids for intra message references. The issue of caching a
reference vs caching the item was also brought up but did not seem to reach
closure.
It seems to me that associating the content-id with the encapsulated headers
(i.e. with the external body) allows more efficient caching. Independent of
that issue, use of an external-body reference to a part that resides in the same
message requires the content-id to be part of the encapsulated headers. If you
then have a "required" content-id header on the wrapper headers it seems kind of
klunky.
What am I missing?
Gabe
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Gabe Beged-Dov e-mail: gabe(_at_)cv(_dot_)hp(_dot_)com
Hewlett-Packard
Open Systems Software Division,
Corvallis, Oregon phone: (503)750-4415
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