- From: John Stracke <francis@appoint.net>
- Date: Wed, 13 Jan 1999 15:17:47 +0000
- To: w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
"Slein, Judith A" wrote: > I agree that if we tackle this problem, we should use existing tools for > implementation if possible. MIME is certainly a candidate to be taken > seriously. I see compound documents as a conceptual layer on top of WebDAV > collections or MIME multipart or ... The practical problem with layering like this is that you can't actually vary the lower layers and still keep interoperability. How many implementations of HTTP, or SMTP, have you seen that were not running over TCP? It could be done, but the resulting software would be limited to a small island of connectivity. Similarly, if a compound document spec just specifies the concepts, and leaves the representation up to implementers, then we don't have interop. Whatever working group addresses this problem may want to layer the spec conceptually, but they should make sure they specify a recommended representation, too. Otherwise we'll all be stuck using different representations, and we'll have chaos until everybody migrates to whatever representation Microsoft decides to build into Office. (No offense meant. Microsoft *might* spontaneously come up with the best of all possible protocols; but the point of standards bodies is to make sure we don't have to rely on them to do so.) -- /==============================================================\ |John Stracke | My opinions are my own |S/MIME & HTML OK | |francis@appoint.net|==========================================| |Chief Scientist |NT's lack of reliability is only surpassed| |Appoint.Net, Inc. | by its lack of scalability. -- John Kirch| \==============================================================/ -- [This message was sent using an evaluation copy of IMail Server for Windows NT, a product of Ipswitch, Inc.]
Received on Wednesday, 13 January 1999 13:16:53 UTC