[284] in DCNS Development
Re: [WWW, WAIS, Gopher via MIME --> how soon, what impact?]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steven Wade Neiterman)
Mon Dec 14 11:49:11 1992
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 92 11:52:58 EST
From: wade@MIT.EDU (Steven Wade Neiterman)
To: techinfo@MIT.EDU, wdc@MIT.EDU
Cc: developers@MIT.EDU
From what I can gather, people are looking a mime as a way to standardize viewing
multiple file formats without creating a viewer for each format. At this time, there
is a "hack" to invoke the metamail viewer on Unix if the document type is of "Mime"
format.
Here are some messages from a gopher-archive on the Gopher/Wais/WWW mime stuff.
You can make your own judgement as to what they may be doing.
..Steve
________________________________________________________________________
From: michael@fantasy.gatech.edu (Michael Mealling)
I've modified gopher0.9 so that you can have a MIME type. The complete
distribution is on:
boombox.micro.umn.edu:/pub/gopher/Unix/incoming/gopher0.9.1.tar.Z
(It's not really 0.9.1. It was just an easy way to keep them all seperate.)
I havn't modified the server so that it will test to see if something is
MIME compliant so you have to use the .cap entry to override the Type. The
Type is 'M'. I will be setting up a server tomorrow evening that includes
all of the MIME samples that Nathaniel Borenstein has. I will also be
putting Where The Bufallo Roams comix in both formats up.
All you need to do is make sure that the metamail executables are in your
path. You can also pass any metamail parameters you want by adding them to
conf.h. NOTE: This was a quick hack so it ain't pretty.
If you have any questions send mail to michael@fantasy.gatech.edu.
_______________________________________________________________________
I made that quick hack and put it on boombox. The patch is very simple.
All I did was have show_file() exec 'metamail' instead of 'more' when
Type=M. I did not put automatic recognition of MIME files in the server so
you have to put an override in your .cap.
With the new 2.3 version of metamail you can also just specify
`metamail -p' as your pager instead of more. This version will just
exec 'more' for you when it doesn't see a Content Type: in the header. Also
someone has written a metamail server (?!). I don't know what this might
emply but it could be a more 'efficient' distribution method than FTP for
under the sheets stuff like gopher and WWW. Who knows...
>There is already a MIME extension to Gopher posted at BOOMBOX. Could
>someone who has used it please comment?
I've used it. :-) I was amazed at how easy it was to get seamless interaction
between gopher and metamail. The only caveat is that, as a few people have
mentioned, you get unwanted formats in your file that are very large. For
an example try looking at my gopher-mime server running at:
Name=Georgia Tech MIME-Gopher
Host=evalsun.gatech.edu
Port=2050
That one has all of Nat's MIME sample files on it plus the Where The
Buffalo Roam comic in GIF format.
>I am curious if the MIME extensions support the MIME 'multi-part' type?
I would think so since I'm just using Nat's metamail. If he does it then
gopher does it.
>In most MIME applications, the belief is that you should display all
>possible document types in case the user wants to retrieve a document for
>display later on a platform that he/she is currently not using (dumb
>terminal for example wanting to retrieve a bit map for example).
>I personally see IMAP, MIME and Gopher all merging together. Wouldn't it be
>neat to have one application that does Internet/Multi-media mail and
>Internet access to thousands of sites? Available from ANY platform!!!
I havn't looked at IMAP closely yet. If it can send parts of a MIME document
based on what the client is capable then that would be a more bandwidth-smart
solution.
If you want to try it out then grab gopher0.9.1.tar.Z from
boombox.micro.umn.edu:/pub/gopher/incoming. I havn't made the modes to the
1.0beta yet. Question to the umn-gopher team: Is 1.0 going to have MIME
allready in it?
>Mark Thacker
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Mealling ! Hypermedia WWW, WAIS, and gopher will be
Georgia Institute of Technology ! here soon via MIME. Your view of the
Internet: michael@fantasy.gatech.edu ! internet is about to change completely!
_______________________________________________________________________
From: connolly@convex.com (Dan Connolly)
>Anyone aware of any work being done to allow WWW (well, Viola in particular)
>aware of the MIME format info? Right now Viola is a hypertext presentation
>format which can wander thru the internet zones presenting text, graphics, etc.
>Gopher, WAIS, NNTP seem to be being investigated or integrated - just curious
>about MIME. Now if there were only a Unix based HGML editor...
Just to clarify: WWW, the World Wide Web, is a global hypertext project
that defines a hypertext data format (HTML, the HyperText Markup
Language), an addressing scheme that makes FTP, WAIS, gopher, NNTP, and HTTP
(their own protocol) objects addressable, and provides some client and
server software.
Viola is a multimedia authoring environment ala HyperCard. Pei Wei implemented
a WWW client (browser) using Viola. I hear it's nifty.
The Gopher, WWW, and WAIS systems interoperate to some extent: you can
send plain text files between them pretty easily. So we have the
beginning of a global hypertext system.
There are various pilot projects to incorporate multimedia into these
projects: several WAIS and Gopher servers offer GIF images and the like.
But these pilot projects usually consist of a specially modified client
and server for each data type. For example, you can grab a special
Gopher server configured to handle PICT files on a Mac, and if you
have the associated special client, they can communicate.
I think some folks have done the same thing for WAIS. But you can't
point the pict-capable gopher client at the pict-capable WAIS server
and expect good results.
I have suggested to all of these groups that they use MIME as a substrate
to bring the level of interoperability from plain text to multimedia,
in order to turn this global hypertext system into a global
hypermedia system.
The WAIS project seems willing to obsolete its type system ("TEXT"
"GIF" etc.) in favor of the MIME type system ("text/plain" "image/gif"
etc.). If the gopher and WWW projects do the same, we will
be on our way...
By the way: there is a lot of damage that can be done by talking
about "MIME format" carelessly. Lots of folks will think that
gif images have to be encoded, and they have to add special headers
and stuff to translate their data to "MIME format." Those restrictions
only apply to the message/rfc-822 content type.
The MIME typing system is completely orthogonal to the transport
issues of RFC-822 mail messages.
For example, on an appropriately configured system, you could
invoke:
% metamail -b -c "image/gif" corvette.gif
or
% metamail -b -c "application/postscript" rfc-822.ps
where corvette.gif is a normal GIF file, and rfc-822.ps
is a normal postscript file, and the files would be
displayed by the appropriate utilities.
Dan
