Earthlink wrote:
It's not clear that specialized media types solve any problem at all,
in the case of XML that already contains a document declaration.
The overhead of having to open up every XML document to find out what
document type it is is not practical. As in the case of email, all I should
have to do is ask for a particular type of object from the store and get it.
Yes. Thanks for bringing to our attention the fact that IMAP uses
servers, as well as HTTP; since I use POP I tend to forget about what
IMAP does.
Is it possible to request the "best" of several multipart/alternate
message bodyparts over IMAP, where "best" means the preferences of MIME
type that the user has?
In addition, though, we also want to get at subtypes of objects. Or in the
case of MIME type/subtypes, this would be the "sub-sub type". For example,
for a calendar object (text/calendar) we want to pull to the client just the
"event invitations". This would be the "sub sub type" of type=text,
subtype=calendar.
What about parameters, can these be handled?
For example the CGM registration (image/cgm) defined two mandatory
parameters; this was a problem at the time because parameters were not
well handled by current implementations. But recently, W3C made WebCGM
(a particuklar profile) a Recommendation, and were able to use those
parameters to indicate thata particular CGM used the WebCGM profile.
This was handy, no additional registration was necessary and the general
semantics of imege/cgm still apply to WebCGM, but specific semantics are
also added.
Would IMAP be able to fetch image/cgm;Version=4;ProfileId=WebCGM
bodyparts specifically?
This use of parameters for profiles of a registered type/subtype
combination sounds to me much like the possibilities with registering
text/xhtml and then declaring the various HTML profiles for mobile, TV
etc.
--
Chris