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- Newsgroups: comp.mail.mime
- Path: sparky!uunet!eco.twg.com!twg.com!news
- From: "David Herron" <david@twg.com>
- Subject: Re: Using MIME without extra mail headers
- Message-ID: <1993Jan12.191444.19513@twg.com>
- Sensitivity: Personal
- Encoding: 30 TEXT , 4 TEXT
- Sender: news@twg.com (USENET News System)
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- Organization: The Wollongong Group, Inc., Palo Alto, CA
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- Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 19:20:02 GMT
- Lines: 35
-
- ag129@cus.cam.ac.uk (Alasdair Grant) writes:
- > My problem is
- ...
- > (b) that I seem to be unique in thinking that MIME could be a general
- > solution for all kinds of file structuring applications, such as
- > those currently handled by ODA, SGML and various ad hoc encodings,
- > or by context, or by making guesses based on file content or file
- > name, in applications where the concept of "headers" is not present.
- > For example I see no reason why program source code should not use
- > the MIME tagging mechanism to indicate which language it is in, and
- > cause the appropriate compiler to be invoked on its content.
-
- Well.. if you'd mentioned this initially it might've saved some problem.. ;-)
-
- It's been pointed out that the gophers and waisers are using MIME in
- non-mail applications.
-
- MIME could be a file structuring thing as you're suggesting. It's was
- designed with mail systems in mind but I can't think of many things which
- are unique to them. The most obvious is encoding anything not 7-bit clean.
-
- But why is MIME *uniquely* suited to this purpose? The MacIntosh
- environment, for example, has its own way of tagging which compiler
- to use. I personally would like to use SGML to edit my source
- files, have an SGML->particular-language translator, etc. It would
- do Knuth's ``literate programming'' one better by using a widely accepted
- standard markup language at least. But this is orthogonal to the issue
- of whether there should be a header in the file marking what kind of
- file it is.
-
-
- <- David Herron <david@twg.com> (work) <david@davids.mmdf.com> (home)
- <-
- <- "That's our advantage at Microsoft; we set the standards and we can change them."
- <- Karen Hargrove of Microsoft quoted in the Feb 1993 Unix Review editorial.
-