In <p0501041ab6a0bd6bbc6f(_at_)[130(_dot_)237(_dot_)150(_dot_)141]> Jacob Palme
<jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se> writes:
Some readers of Charles Lindseys message may wonder why he
asked for "cid:" support in plain text, why not HTML. The
reason for this is, I believe, that HTML in messages is
tremendously disliked by many people in the Usenet News
community. They are planning to implement ways for a News-
group to forbid HTML content.
Yes, that is essentially the position I am coming from. HTML in news is to
be severely discouraged (though not actually forbidden) just as binaries
in news are severely discouraged. Again, hierarchies or groups explictly
intended for binaries (or for HTML for that matter) are fine, so long as
everybody agrees about them.
The same is essentially true of email. It is not considered polite to send
email in such forms unless you know that your correspondents is happy to
receive it that way.
So this still leave the question of how to send a digest (or other
multipart) in either mail or news and to include with it some text
explaining what it is about and including pointers to the individual
digest items (whether in the form of a table of contents, or otherwise).
That sounds like a useful thing to do, and it would seem that URLs
identifying the items by their Content-ID is the proper way to do it, and
the <cid: ...> URL seems to be the proper one for the job.
But no current software seems to support it, judging by replies received
so far. So is it a case where an RFC is needed to set out the proper way
to do it (and should that cope with the general issue of URLs within
text/plain - which are widely implemented on an ad hoc basis at the
moment)?
I believe RFC 2110 has something to say on this issue, but I haven't
retrieved it yet.
--
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Email: chl(_at_)clw(_dot_)cs(_dot_)man(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk Web:
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Voice/Fax: +44 161 436 6131 Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
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