Ed Levinson <elevinso(_at_)Accurate(_dot_)COM> writes
Yes! MIME readers must not need to understand html. A model that
helped me separate the issues (wrt SGML) has three elements, not two.
+------------+ +------------+ +------------+
? MIME ? ? Receiving ? ? Web ?
-->? User Agent ?----->? Agent ?----->? Browser ?
^ +------------+ ^ +------------+ ^ +------------+
? ? ?
?<-messages ?<-data files ?<--?<url,file>?
?<--headers
Using this model the MIME UA (MUA) just deals with the body parts
and passes the names of the data files and files containing the
headers to a Receiving Agent (RA, an impdedance matcher between
the MUA and the browser). The RA may require knowledge of the
browser and HTML. In my view it examines the Content-Disposition
(cDisp) headers and moves the corresponding data to the browser's
cache.
After doing its job the RA invokes the browser. The RA takes care of
mapping URLs into local file names, something that should not concern
the sender.
This sounds very complex to me, Keith Moores idea of just saving the
parts as files, and then refer to the file names in the HTML document,
seems much much simpler.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jacob Palme <jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme