Re: HTTP - why not multiple connections?

Thus wrote: Marc Salomon
>|Well, I assume you are proposing (hypothetically, anyway) that the
>|server rewrite the HTML it's transmitting to add the WIDTH and HEIGHT
>|attributes.
>
>If the server would have to open each image in any event in order to pack it 
>into a multipart message.  It could have access to the image size parameters
>and include them in the a MIME header.

This, by the way, is an excellent example of the kind of ways in which
Internet media-types might be refined to make things work better for
our purposes.  The content-type image/gif (or possibly all image
subtypes) should have optional parameters for width and height (and
possibly colors, and maybe other things I am not thinking of.)  This
allows that information to be passed around along with the
content-type.  It wasn't included originally because it's trivial to
determine from the file itself -- given the email centric assumption
that you have the file to look at.

Unfortunately, media type registration issues like this aren't made as
clear as they could be.  I'd like to see this group get a better idea
of the kind of things we need from media types and try to add them to
the registry (as opposed to doing something incredibly stupid, like
establishing our own parallel registry or just using the labels without
bothering to register them.)
--
Marc VanHeyningen  <URL:http://www.cs.indiana.edu/hyplan/mvanheyn.html>

Received on Friday, 16 December 1994 14:27:41 UTC