Re: Starting the ietf-xml-mime mailing list

[Chris Lilley <chris@xxxxxx>]

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