Re: Enhancing mailcaps for MIME and WWW

David Crossley (davidc@erin.gov.au)
Sat, 21 May 94 12:25:00 EST


On Thu, 19 May 1994 Marc VanHeyningen <mvanheyn@cs.indiana.edu> writes:

> Mailcaps have a great deal of promise as a mechanism for centralizing
> configuration information about handling MIME content-types,
> permitting a variety of programs to successfully handle new items
> with a relative minimum of fuss. It is assumed that most programs
> will have a (reasonably small) set of content-types they can handle
> directly and will use this file to resolve others.

Can you Marc, or someone else, point me towards some sources of information
about MIME? I have a basic understanding but will need much more to be able
to contribute to (or even follow) this discussion.

> Of particular importance to me is the presence of MIME in the WWW
> community, and the desirability of these two bodies of thought to try
> to forge good things together rather than each do different and
> incompatible things, as has happened in a few cases.
>
> I believe both the mail-based MIME and WWW communities stand to
> benefit from a unified content-type information file which is
> somewhat, but not radically, richer than the present configuration.
> I'd like to find some other people who are interested in doing this
> and hammer out some issues.

The WAIS community also stands to benefit escpecially with the multiformat
capabilities of WAIS and WWW.

David Crossley - Geographic Information Systems Manager
internet: davidc@erin.gov.au
URL http://kaos.erin.gov.au/erin.html
Australian Environmental Resources Information Network - ERIN