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

R. David Murray rdmurray at bitdance.com
Tue Sep 3 17:28:32 CEST 2013

On Tue, 03 Sep 2013 10:01:42 -0400, "R. David Murray" <rdmurray at bitdance.com> wrote:

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

I meant "a text/plain root part inside a multipart/alternative", which is what you said, I just didn't understand it at first :) Although I wonder how many GUI MUAs do the fallback to multipart/mixed with just a normal text/plain root part, too. I would expect a text-only MUA would, since it has no other way to display a multipart/related...but a graphical MUA might just assume that there will always be an html part in a multipart/related.

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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