Bob,
It is my understanding that MIME is a transport layer, not an
application layer. It is used to tranport multimedia objects through
an environment that normally does not allow such transference (like
email) and to allow easy classification of said objects (read:
content-type, etc).
MIME itself does not contain a linking language, but that is something
that can be built on top of it.
For example, the main project I work on at the MIT Media Lab is called
the Media Bank, which is a distributed server for synchronous data
types (like audio and video). A major goal is to try to bring
synchronous data into a Web-like-environment (read: MIME). Right now,
for example, we have the video and audio segments for a movie on
different disks, and we can combine them, in real-time, into a
full-playing movie. In the relatively near future, we will have the
ability to take that movie, having broken it into many many small
pieces, and combine them on the fly!
This sounds like what you want, at least to some degree. But it is
not MIME that is providing this; MIME is only the transport (or, at
least, a possible transport). This same system could be used to take
a multipart MIME message and "play" it, where "play" means put it
together in some well-defined fashion.
I think further details would be inappropriate for the pem-dev mailing
list, and should be taken offline.
Does this help?
-derek
Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, G MIT Media Laboratory
Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board (SIPB)
Home page: http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/warlord/home_page.html
warlord(_at_)MIT(_dot_)EDU PP-ASEL N1NWH PGP key available