* On 17 Jul 2009, lee wrote:
>
> Well, I'm not trying to mislead someone. Where is defined what an
> attachment is for the context of a MUA, and who made the definition?
Content-Disposition's role is described in RFC 2183. But "attachment"
is a very ambiguous term. There is no English analogue for a message
component with Content-Disposition: inline ("inlinement"? no), and many
MUAs incorrectly identify disposition when constructing MIME messages.
That's why mutt's attachment-counting rules are flexible enough to allow
you to identify inline components as attachments if you wish (even
though they don't by default).
> > An attachment is a message entity that a user is likely to add or
> > save to and from the file system, as separate to the main message.
>
> In Kyles example, that would be saving the html attachment to view it
> in a web browser. The user might do that himself, the MUA might do it
> automatically. If you use a MUA that cannot display text/plain, you
> might save the text/plain to display it ...
HTML components are most often best considered inline these days, since
most HTML components represent the sender's message. If you wanted
to say "here is an example of an HTML file that does what I'm talking
about", and attached that to your message as an exhibit, that would be
properly flagged as "Content-Disposition: attach".
It's less about what the user wants to do, and more about the
component's relationship to the message that the sender composed. But
this is still rather subjective.
--
-D. d...@uchicago.edu NSIT University of Chicago
