Re: taxonomies

On 2/6/2004 2:37 PM, Martin Duerst wrote:

> One thing I'm not clear about is whether it is possible to make
> a strict distinction between human consumption and machine
> consumption.

I don't think these are mutually exclusive.

> Let's pick a single example:
> 
> Users would like to do scheduling and meeting planning using
> email. This includes:

> Can this and similar things be done with one part for human
> consumption and one part for machine consumption?

I don't see why not. The content headers could presumably contain tags
which indicate that the message is for human display (an MUA) and a
scheduling app both, and the message body could be multipart/mixed with
each part containing relevant data for each of those processes.

In my worldview, those tags are delivery extensions with private header
sequences, so there's no problem having multiple apps reuse the same
header block (or body, as illustrated). Some automated exchanges may not
even require body parts, and those apps could theoretically get by with
content headers alone.

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/