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Re: The <cid: ...> URL - who implements it?

2001-02-06 03:19:01
At 11.55 +0000 01-02-05, Charles Lindsey wrote:
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.

What you are doing is inventing a new mark-up language for
mail and news, in addition to the existing richtext and HTML
mark-up languages.

It seems silly to invent a new rich text format just because you
dislike HTML. Would it not be better, instead, to analyze the reasons
you dislike HTML, and specify a subset of HTML including restrictions
on where to use it, which satisfies your needs but avoids what you
dislike in HTML. If such a subset of HTML could be defined and avoids
your problems with HTML, it would allow reading software to use the
same code for interpreting full HTML and the subset you allow.
So only the producing software need to be rewritten to support
the new format.

If, for example, you dislike HTML because it is dificult to read
for those who read it as plain text, it might be possible to
define a way of using HTML to avoid this problem.

An example of such human-readable HTML coding is shown below:

--- --- ---

<p>   This is an example of HTML code, which is written
      so as to be readable for people who read it as
      plain text.

<p>   Here is the second paragraph, which contains a
         <a href="cid:456*foo@bar.net"> link
</a>  to a separate body part.
<p>   Here is an embedded picture:

<p>      <img src="cid:123*foo@bar.net" width="13" height="13">

<p>   End of this HTML-formatted message.

--- --- ---

Using such coding would eliminate the need for combining
HTML witch multipart/alternative, which today is commonly
done in order to produce messages readable for those, whose
readers do not support HTML. It would thus reduce the
larger size of messages needed to contain two alternatives
of the same text.


--
Jacob Palme <jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/jpalme/