Re: Mail etc. syntax support in WWW _clients_

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.

Received on Saturday, 3 September 1994 01:11:49 UTC