[Python-Dev] Completing the email6 API changes. (original) (raw)

R. David Murray rdmurray at bitdance.com
Tue Sep 3 16:01:42 CEST 2013

On Tue, 03 Sep 2013 10:56:36 +0900, "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

R. David Murray writes: > I can understand the structure Glen found in Applemail: > a series of text/plain parts interspersed with image/jpg, with all parts > after the first being marked 'Contentent-Disposition: inline'. Any MUA > that can display text and images ought to handle that correctly and > produce the expected result. But that isn't what your structure above > would produce. If you did: > > multipart/related > multipart/alternative > text/html > text/plain > image/png > text/plain > image/png > text/plain > > and only referred to the png parts in the text/html part and marked all > the parts as 'inline' (even though that is irrelevant in the text/html > related case), an MUA that knew about this technique could display it > "correctly", but an MUA that is just following the standards most > likely won't.

OK, I see that now. It requires non-MIME information about the treatment of the root entity by the implementation. On the other hand, it shouldn't hurt. RFC 2387 explicitly specifies that at least some parts of a contained multipart/related part should be able to refer to entities related via the containing multipart/related. Since it does not mention any restrictions on contained root entities, I take it that it implicitly specifies that any contained multipart may make such references. But I suspect it's not implemented by most MUAs. I'll have to test.

OK, I see what you are driving at now. Whether or not it works is dependent on whether or not typical MUAs handle a multipart/related with a text/plain root part by treating it as if it were a multipart/mixed with inline or attachment sub-parts. So yes, whether or not we should support and/or document this technique very much depends on whether or not typical MUAs do so. I will, needless to say, be very interested in the results of your research :)

--David

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