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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