- From: John Stracke <francis@appoint.net>
- Date: Wed, 13 Jan 1999 13:34:11 +0000
- To: w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
"Slein, Judith A" wrote:
> multipart/related might be part of an implementation of compound documents
> -- the way to represent its content when you want to transport the whole
> compound document together -- but I doubt that it provides everything people
> will want. For example, normally you expect to be able to operate both on
> the compound document as a whole and on each of its components individually.
But, for that, you can create a multipart/related whose body parts are stored
externally, using a message/external-body (or perhaps just a Content-Location:,
though that's apparently not part of MIME proper).
Advantages of doing structured documents as multipart/related instead of
collections:
* There are obviously going to be types of structured documents;
multipart/related already has a mechanism and namespace for specifying
these types.
* Given a multipart/related document with externall parts, there's an
obvious way to serialize the document for transport.
* Structural sharing: if two structured documents use the same image (for
example), and the DAV server doesn't support references, then a
collections-based approach requires that that image be copied, since
there's no way for a client to tell the server to have it show up in both
collections. With a multipart/related approach, you just have both
documents reference the same image.
* Cross-server documents: with multipart/related, the external body parts
can live anywhere on the Net (well, anywhere accessible to the client,
anyway ;-). With collections, this works only if the DAV server supports
references.
(Mind you, I hope references will be pretty common; but, if we don't have to
depend on them, we shouldn't.)
--
/===============================================================\
|John Francis Stracke| http://www.thibault.org |S/MIME & HTML OK|
|francis@thibault.org|==========================================|
|Xton, Mists, West |NT's lack of reliability is only surpassed|
|My LAN, my opinions.| by its lack of scalability. -- John Kirch|
\===============================================================/
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Received on Wednesday, 13 January 1999 11:33:16 UTC