From: asg@severn.wash.inmet.com (Al Gilman)
Message-Id: <9511212217.AA07499@severn.wash.inmet.com>
Subject: Re: mid and cid URLs
To: moore@cs.utk.edu (Keith Moore)
Date: Tue, 21 Nov 1995 17:17:48 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <199511212035.PAA01709@wilma.cs.utk.edu> from "Keith Moore" at Nov 21, 95 03:35:12 pm
To follow up on what Keith Moore said ...
I've been thinking of "cid", "message/external-body; access-type=cid"
(and by association, "mid") as *URL* schemes, especially (for the
former two) within the context of multipart/related. Such a scheme is
useful even without the URN infrastructure.
For all the reasons that Ned has been teaching me, a "cid" does
not represent a reliable _location_ reference. It is a name used
in searching for the cited object. Even inside the same MIME
multipart.
The Message-ID is in use today as an object name in the
"In-reply-to" header in RFC 822 mail that knows nothing about
MIME. And it is now used by Hypermail at random _receiving_
sites that have nothing to do with the sending location to
reconstruct threads of dialog.
The Message-ID is a URN that is successful today. Content-ID is
[?? you tell me.].
You don't have to define and provide a retrieval service for object
naming on widely-distributed objects like RFC 822 mail and News to
be a useful construct.
Al