Re: New type suggested: Multipart/Related

> Excerpts from mail: 20-May-93 Re: New type suggested: Mul.. Dana S Emery(_at_)umail(_dot_)umd(_dot_)e (791*)


> If we are to support Main/attachment structure, then its seems obvious that
> tagging a part as "main" is a usefully minimal strategy.

I think that's right.  The real issue is that some models (Andrew for example) don't really have any notion of "main" -- the main message is itself often multipart, and includes in-line pictures like this one:

As you can see from the above picture, the Andrew users sees (and tends to compose) a multimedia message at the top-level.  If you treated the first part -- in this case richtext -- as being the whole message, you'd end up with an incoherent partial message, followed by some attachments that really ought to be viewed in sequential order if you're to have any hope of making sense of the message.  Other mail readers have a model that there's a main part -- typically text -- with attachments, but in Andrew there's no real such notion, although you can do attachments, e.g.:

sample
Description: An attachment

Anyway, I'm hoping that by including the picture of what my screen looked like when composing this, I'll give people in the attachment-oriented world a better idea of what things might look like from the other side of the fence...  -- Nathaniel