At 11:57 AM 5/1/02 +0200, Kai Henningsen wrote:
While not universally loved, that immediately brings to mind XML. Which
conveniently also has an existing solution to the character set problem.
AND many existing implementations.
I assume data would still have MIME types, the parameters would just be
encoded differently - I see no reason to invent a different data typing
scheme here.
I can't resist mentioning
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-klyne-message-rfc822-xml-03.txt
Possibly the correct thing is to follow one XML blob (with everything that
in a MIME message is in headers, including internal ones in multiparts)
with a number of binary blob, possibly with a HTTP-1.1-like minimal length
encoding ... hmm. Can't say I like that a lot ... but MIME-header-like
versions don't really seem to be any better either.
The above proposal uses MIME multipart/related with a cid: URI reference
from the XML header section. For the (common?) case of pure text or XML
payload, it can be embedded in the header, and a local fragment identifier
used as the target reference.
#g
-------------------
Graham Klyne
<GK(_at_)NineByNine(_dot_)org>