[ticker-dev] ticker attachments (again)

[Ian Lister]

On Wed, 2 Oct 2002, David Arnold wrote:
>in ticker conversation today, Ian has proposed that the draft ticker
>v3 spec be revised, renaming "Attachment" to "MIME-Attachment".

For the record it was only a tentative suggestion, which I decided wasn't
worth persuing following subsequent conversation, but... :-)

>it's my impression (please correct me if i'm wrong, Ian) that the
>motivation is to facilitate transition to alternative forms of
>attachment in future, should that be required.

The motivation was more an idea that content routed data is more useful
the more it can be interpreted in its own context i.e. without dependence
on the context of the producer, consumer or protocol the notification is
supposed to conform to.

This requires applications to use attribute names that are consistent
between applications. The name isn't necessarily important - we could call
it `Foo' if all applications (not just Tickertape) consistently used that
name for attached MIME data - but it seems that having a reasonably
unambigous name that clearly describes the nature of the value can only
help.

>in particular, the use of (the oft-proposed) structured notifications
>to represent the nested attributes of an attachment might be possible
>in future Elvin revisions.

That is certainly an issue to consider but I am happy we can use
MIME-Version, MIME-Type, etc as attribute names (or sub-names) if we break
the MIME data apart into separately addressable named components
(attributes).

>additionally, the use of a monolithic MIME attachment is controversial
>(to say the least :-) which IMO also argues for facilitation of later
>replacement.

Facilitation of later replacement is good :-)

Ian