[5468] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: Mail etc. syntax support in WWW _clients_
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Henrik Frystyk Nielsen)
Fri Sep 2 19:33:49 1994
Date: Sat, 3 Sep 1994 01:22:07 +0200
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: frystyk@ptsun00.cern.ch
From: frystyk@ptsun00.cern.ch (Henrik Frystyk Nielsen)
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
Phil Hallam Baker and I are currently working on getting a new MIME
parser into the World-Wide Web Library of Common Code - it has been on
the working list for a long time. The idea is to get it finished this
fall. Furthermore, I am experimenting with the stream stack so that
converting `raw' data from NNTP, FTP, Gopher etc. into HTML is done
just like all the other conversions as for example text/plain ->
text/html. Then, of cause, they can also be parsed as `*/*' so that the
client can get the original data sent from the remote servers.
This means basically that the library from being HTML based turns into
a generic protocol code base with a set of independent protocol
modules. A combination of this also gives the possibility of viewing
rfc822 messages - both HTML formatted and the original message.
Multipart, however will not get implemented right now - simply because
of the amount of other work to be done :-(
-- cheers --
Henrik Frystyk
> But wouldn't it make a lot more sense to support mail syntax and gnu
> info syntax in WWW clients?
>
> Every HTTP client already has code to parse RFC822 headers to deal
> with HTTP return messages. The same code could be used to parse mail
> messages from local disk, or from FTP servers, etc.
>
> Support for viewing message/rfc822 (with recursive MIME body part handling...)
> and gnu info format object should be part of libwww.
