On Thu, 2 Nov 1995, Ed Levinson wrote:
The mechanism for providing a server location for those Web elements
included in the MIME message could be Content-Location as Jacob
proposed or Content-Disposition as Keith suggested. I prefer the
latter and would have the file name be a URL. Does anything prevent
that? Rfc 1806, Content-Disposition says
The receiving MUA should not respect any directory path
information .... The filename should be treated as a terminal
component only.
The advantage with "Content-Location", as I suggested, was that if the
message gets into the hand of an ordinary Web Browser, it can show
the entire message including the related parts by getting them
from the network. With "Content-Disposition" this will only work if the
e-mail system saves the related components into suitable files before
turning the message over to the Web Browser.
The advantage with Content-Disposition is (a) files are available
locally and need not be fetched from the net (b) no problem with
private messages. Private messages can however be accomodated for
by putting a random password into the URL, so that only those who
have the URL can get the message. Not highest degree of security,
but normal Internet mail does not provide high security. For high
security, special security functions should be available.
My choice is still to use Content-Location, since this will work
with existing mail systems and existing web browsers without any
change at all. (The only facility needed is that the mail system
can save "Text/HTML" parts in a file.) The Content-Disposition
solution requires more changes to the mail system to work reasonably
well. The effciency disadvantage of Content-Disposition cannot
be so severe, since this is the way normal WWW usage always works.
And with advanced mail systems, there will not be any efficiency
disadvantage, since they can fetch the related parts locally
also with the Content-Location solution.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jacob Palme <jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme