ietf-822
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Re: C-D: Attachment Clarification

1995-01-19 13:02:26

"Terry" == Terry Crowley <tcrowley(_at_)kilsythe(_dot_)banyan(_dot_)com> 
writes:
  Terry> It might be worthwhile noting that the original example that
  Terry> led to this discussion, where an attachment was shown in the
  Terry> middle of a paragraph, is not actually representable in MIME
  Terry> with any variant of a Content-Disposition header.

It's always been my position that real compound documents will require
a real compound document format (html is getting there). An MUA can
decide to stick attachments in the body of a message if it wants,
though...that's up to the implementor. 

C-D specifically avoids addressing how to do compound documents
because it's a complex issue, best dealt with in a text or application
subtype.

  Terry> It turns out that encoding this kind of presentation
  Terry> information involves quite a bit more work in defining what
  Terry> your compound document model is.  The MIME authors wisely
  Terry> avoided diving into this can of worms (I bet Nathaniel's ODA
  Terry> experience had something to do with that).

Originally the C-D draft had a lot of verbiage about this very
point. That survives today in:

    powerful and flexible approach will be necessary. The
    definition of such approaches is beyond the scope of this
    memo; however, such approaches can benefit from additional
    Content-Disposition values and parameters, to be defined at a
    later date.

-Rens