Re: Recursive look up of base in outer headers

Al Gilman <asgilman@access.digex.net> Sat, 30 August 1997 13:15 UTC

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From: Al Gilman <asgilman@access.digex.net>
Message-Id: <199708301305.JAA28944@access2.digex.net>
Subject: Re: Recursive look up of base in outer headers
To: mhtml@segate.sunet.se
Date: Sat, 30 Aug 1997 09:05:00 -0400
Cc: uri@bunyip.com
In-Reply-To: <v03007800b02cd020a684@[130.237.158.12]> from Jacob Palme at "Aug 29, 97 09:34:58 pm"
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to follow up on what Jacob Palme said:

> 
> The contradiction is that RFC 1808 as well as draft-fielding-url-syntax
> say that if there is no base in the HTML text, and no base in its
> content heading, then you should recursively look at surrounding
> content headings to find a base. RFC 2110, on the other hand,
> says that you should only look for a base in the immediatly
> surrounding header, not go out to surronding multi-part headings.
> 

Some reading I have done recently in the HTML 4 draft suggests
that webmasters are interested in managing metadata such as
locators for "house styles" on a directory (file tree) basis and
not always at the atomic file level.  This is probably reflective
of archive management practices more generally.  This suggests
that bringing the MHTML base-finding rules in line with RFC 1808
would be more consistent with the way that many of the files to
be transmitted as MIME parts are managed at their originating
sites, and you are more likely to get header usage in practice
that matches the published rules.

--
Al Gilman