Re: the gap regarding Archived-At

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

> What seems more interesting to me is the following: The MUA
> finds an http: URI, and invokes the browser. The browser
> resolves the http: URI, and fetches a document with media
> type message/rfc882. The browser then invokes the MUA to
> handle that media type. That way, the browser actually
> does some work, rather than just playing ping-pong.

while this kind of "display this URI" functionality is typically 
supported by web browsers, I'm not aware of any email MUAs that support 
it.

it's pretty easy to implement enough of http to do a GET (including 
handling of redirects), so I'm not worried about the burden on the MUA 
of doing that.  what does concern me is that the MUA doesn't reliably 
know whether it can handle the resource until it actually does the GET. 
  it could then pass the downloaded resource to the browser, but that 
tends to mess up things like relative URIs.  so the decision of whether 
to handle the resource itself or to pass it off to the browser has to 
happen after the GET. (granted, it could do a HEAD, but that's still 
awkward).