🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov15.075116.22534@cas.org> lvirden@cas.org (Larry W. Virden) writes:
>
>Anyone aware of any work being done to allow WWW (well, Viola in particular)
>aware of the MIME format info?  Right now Viola is a hypertext presentation
>format which can wander thru the internet zones presenting text, graphics, etc.
>Gopher, WAIS, NNTP seem to be being investigated or integrated - just curious
>about MIME.  Now if there were only a Unix based HGML editor...

Just to clarify: WWW, the World Wide Web, is a global hypertext project
that defines a hypertext data format (HTML, the HyperText Markup
Language), an addressing scheme that makes FTP, WAIS, gopher, NNTP, and HTTP
(their own protocol) objects addressable, and provides some client and
server software.

Viola is a multimedia authoring environment ala HyperCard. Pei Wei implemented
a WWW client (browser) using Viola. I hear it's nifty.

The Gopher, WWW, and WAIS systems interoperate to some extent: you can
send plain text files between them pretty easily. So we have the
beginning of a global hypertext system.

There are various pilot projects to incorporate multimedia into these
projects: several WAIS and Gopher servers offer GIF images and the like.

But these pilot projects usually consist of a specially modified client
and server for each data type. For example, you can grab a special
Gopher server configured to handle PICT files on a Mac, and if you
have the associated special client, they can communicate.

I think some folks have done the same thing for WAIS. But you can't
point the pict-capable gopher client at the pict-capable WAIS server
and expect good results.

I have suggested to all of these groups that they use MIME as a substrate
to bring the level of interoperability from plain text to multimedia,
in order to turn this global hypertext system into a global
hypermedia system.

The WAIS project seems willing to obsolete its type system ("TEXT"
"GIF" etc.) in favor of the MIME type system ("text/plain" "image/gif"
etc.). If the gopher and WWW projects do the same, we will
be on our way...

By the way: there is a lot of damage that can be done by talking
about "MIME format" carelessly. Lots of folks will think that
gif images have to be encoded, and they have to add special headers
and stuff to translate their data to "MIME format." Those restrictions
only apply to the message/rfc-822 content type.

The MIME typing system is completely orthogonal to the transport
issues of RFC-822 mail messages.

For example, on an appropriately configured system, you could
invoke:

% metamail -b -c "image/gif" corvette.gif

or

% metamail -b -c "application/postscript" rfc-822.ps

where corvette.gif is a normal GIF file, and rfc-822.ps
is a normal postscript file, and the files would be
displayed by the appropriate utilities.

Dan