Hi folks,
Bob Herriot and others working on the issue of the MIME encoding
for XHTML-Print, please look at Jacob Palme's RFC 2557 for prior art.
"MIME Encapsulation of Aggregate Documents, such as HTML (MHTML)
ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2557.txt
(March 1999, Proposed Standard)
Also, for some implementation issues and choices, see Jacob's very
recent I-D:
"Sending HTML in MIME, an informational supplement to RFC 2557"
ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-palme-mhtml-info-00.txt
(February 2001)
Cheers,
- Ira McDonald, consulting architect at Sharp and Xerox
High North Inc
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Below is the Abstract from RFC 2557:
Abstract
HTML [RFC 1866] defines a powerful means of specifying multimedia
documents. These multimedia documents consist of a text/html root
resource (object) and other subsidiary resources (image, video clip,
applet, etc. objects) referenced by Uniform Resource Identifiers
(URIs) within the text/html root resource. When an HTML multimedia
document is retrieved by a browser, each of these component resources
is individually retrieved in real time from a location, and using a
protocol, specified by each URI.
In order to transfer a complete HTML multimedia document in a single
e-mail message, it is necessary to: a) aggregate a text/html root
resource and all of the subsidiary resources it references into a
single composite message structure, and b) define a means by which
URIs in the text/html root can reference subsidiary resources within
that composite message structure.
This document a) defines the use of a MIME multipart/related
structure to aggregate a text/html root resource and the subsidiary
resources it references, and b) specifies a MIME content-header
(Content-Location) that allow URIs in a multipart/related text/html
root body part to reference subsidiary resources in other body parts
of the same multipart/related structure.
While initially designed to support e-mail transfer of complete
multi-resource HTML multimedia documents, these conventions can also
be employed to resources retrieved by other transfer protocols such
as HTTP and FTP to retrieve a complete multi-resource HTML multimedia
document in a single transfer or for storage and archiving of
complete HTML-documents.
Differences between this and a previous version of this standard,
which was published as RFC 2110, are summarized in chapter 12.