HTML mail (was: PHP contact manager)
Benjamin Scott
dragonhawk at iname.com
Wed Sep 28 22:35:01 EDT 2005
On Sep 28 at 7:01pm, Michael ODonnell wrote:
> Since I don't read my email with a WWW browser,
> all those pointlessly cluttered [meta-]encodings
> (MIME, RichText, TNEF, HTML, quoted-printable, etc)
> are just a pain in the a**. Please, K.I.S.S...
MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. MIME is not the web.
In fact, it predates Tim Berners-Lee's influential hypertext project by
several years. Work on what became MIME dates at least back to 1988 with
RFC-1049, "Content-Type Header Field for Internet Messages". It is most
recently documented in RFC-2045. MIME is an Internet Draft Standard (the last
step in the standards-track process before becoming an Internet Standard).
MIME messages which contain a text component should include a text/plain
part as an alternative. MIME-compliant MUAs are able to identify the best
alternative (such as text/plain) and discard the rest. MUAs which don't
support MIME should still find the text/plain component readable and compliant
with RFC-822 (STD-11).
More information on MIME is available on the web here:
http://www.mhonarc.org/~ehood/MIME/
If you don't have web access, you can FTP the standard from here:
ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc2045.txt
If you don't have FTP access, you can request the standard via email by
sending a message to RFC-INFO at rfc-editor.org with the message body:
Retrieve: RFC
Doc-ID: RFC2045
Hope this helps,
--
Ben <dragonhawk at iname.com>
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