[JDEV] Proposals (file transfers and info/query)

[arh14 at cornell.edu]

On Tue, 10 Aug 1999, Jeremie wrote:

> > In a previous message your said your FTP proposal would handle the MIME
> > situation. I don't see that is has; however, before I end up posting my MIME
> > 6 page essay I'm asking the question if there is to be more posted soon on
> > the subject? I wouldn't want to post duplicated information.
> 
> What specific MIME functionality is lacking that cannot be expressed via
> normal HTTP/1.1 headers?  The proposal simply suggests that Jabber needn't
> know anything internally about the resources being described by an HTTP
> URL besides the URL itself, and that all other information about that
> resource can be gathered via an HTTP HEAD request to the resource.

Conversely, what HTTP/1.1 headers (that actually make sense in the 
context of Jabber) cannot be represented in MIME?  As far as I know, MIME 
functionality migrated to HTTP and not the other way around.  It just so 
happens that HTTP decided to include the specification of the data it was 
transporting into the actual protocol.  This doesn't, for instance, happen 
in FTP...it's either Ascii or Binary, and you have to layer any extra 
specification on top of that.  In the case of FTP there *doesn't* 
happen to be a coincidental overlap in functionality, which is where the 
common ground of MIME (over any protocol) seems to make sense to me.

I should probably go read the file transfer docs...

Aaron