Re: Content-type: inline in attachments?

[Brian Stafford <brian stafford uklinux net>]

On Wed,  5 September 13:00 Toralf Lund wrote:
>  This is perhaps somewhat off-topic, but it does to a certain degree affect
>  my work on multipart display, and posting list seems to be a good way to
>  get in touch with the RFC gurus, so here I go:
>   I recently used Netscape Messenger to send some messages to myself so that
>  I could test some of my Balsa hacks properly. One of the messages included
>  a number of images and word processor documents in the form of attachments.
>  When I studied the source of this message, I discovered that all
>  attachments are marked with
>  	Content-Disposition: inline
>   Is that the right way to do it?

The right way to do it is the way you want to do it!  Netscape (or rather
Mozilla) doesn't seem to pay much attention to Content-Disposition:.  I have
struggled in the past to make an attachment an "attachment", Mozilla insists
on treating them as "inline".

If you feel that the content should be viewed inline along with the message
a Content-Disposition: with the value "inline" is the correct way to do it.

If you feel that the content is logically separate to the message and should
be viewed only on an explicit action by the message's recipient, then
Content-Disposition: with the value "attachment" is appropriate.

It's likely that only the message sender can make that judgement at the time
when the "attachment" (and I use the word loosely) is added to the message.
Maybe the decision should be made with a right-click menu on the icon
within the "attachments" pane on the message composition window, possibly
with a default depending on the MIME type, e.g. image/* text/* might default
to "inline", other MIME types to "attachment".

Brian