There is a revision of RFC 1036 underway. You may find various drafts, and bits
of drafts, at www.landfield.com/usefor, and there is a mailing list (details on
that same site) for those who want to get really involved. I am the Editor of
the drafts; Dave Barr is the Chair of the Working Group.
Now one of the effects of the revision is that MIME will be recognised as an
integral part of the Netnews protocols (de facto, it already is for many
purposes), and amongst the MIME protocols you will find provision for the
Content-Type "multipart/digest". Here is what I have written into our draft
about that:
The Content-Type: "multipart/digest" is commended for any article
composed of multiple messages more conveniently viewed as separate
entities. The "boundary" should be composed of 28 hyphens (US-ASCII
45) (which makes each boundary delimiter 30 hyphens, or 32 for the
final one) so as to accord with current practice for digests [RFC
1153].
[Actually, this conflicts with some present digest usage (such as the
news.answers rules), but should still be the right way to go. I suggest
this is left in for now (just to stake a claim), while we discuss the
matter with the news.answers moderators and the faq-maintainers.]
[RFC 1153] F. Wancho, "Digest Message Format", RFC 1153, April 1990.
You will also need to look at RFC 2046 for the exact definition of
"multipart/digest".
Well there is not much chance of discussing this with the news.answers
moderators at the present time, but you guys are the faq-maintainers, so
let us get discussing...
Several issues arise:
1. Does it make sense to use multipart/digest for FAQs etc on Usenet?
On the fact of it, yes, since a typical FAQ is composed of separate
answers to a host of separate questions. It would enable newsreaders to
display the various parts with suitable delimiters between them, to step
rapidly through them with the click of a suitable button, to cut and
paste individual parts to files, etc, and maybe even to move immediately
to a given part by clicking on it in the index.
2. Does any software (news or mail) currently support it? AFAIK, no.
But any mime-compliant software that does not support it explicitly
SHOULD treat it as multipart/mixed, and that will usually do something
tolerably sensible. If the facility came into general use, more
digest-specific software would no doubt come into use.
3. Is it compatible with existing Digest usage? Well, almost. What it
will give you, in a newsreader that does not understand MIME, is a
sequence of parts separated by 30 hyphens:
------------------------------
which is pretty close to Chris Lewis' "Minimal Digest Format", and
probably close enough to fool most current newsreaders into accepting
it. The bad news is that MIME will insist on putting one of those lines
of hyphens BEFORE the first part (you are not supposed to display
anything before the first boundary), so you would have to adopt the
convention of putting the introduction/index/TOC/whatever _after_ that
first boundary, which is slightly different to the Chris Lewis rules.
4. Is it compatible with RFC 1153? Not quite, because RFC 1153 provides
for a "Preamble" followed by a line with 70 hyphens, and Mime requires
all the boundaries (except the last) to be the same. But does anybody
still write FAQs in strict conformity to RFC 1153 these days? In any
case, there could be a convention that the Preamble was terminated by a
line of 70 hyphens, followed by a line of 30 hyphens.
5. Is there a way to arrange for an Index (in the preamble) to link to
the individual parts? Well not within existing newsreaders, of course.
But for MIME-compliant newsreaders the proper way would be to put a
Content-ID header in each part, and a <cid: ...> URL for it in the
Index. That might even work in some existing software.
So! Is this worth pursuing (at least to the extent of the short text in
the current grandson-of-0136 draft)? Are some more tweaks needed? Would
it be a useful idea to post some samples to one of the *.test groups, to
see how existing newsreaders would cope?
NOTE: This is posted to the faq-maintainers list and the Usefor Working
Group, but Reply-To is set to the faq-maintainers only (cross-posting
between mailing lists being almost impossible to maintain over a
complete thread).
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Voice/Fax: +44 161 436 6131 Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5
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