Subject: Goals for primary content designation

From: Graham Klyne <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 08 Nov 1999 21:29:11 +0000

Further to discussion in the VPIM BOF today, I'd like to suggests some
goals for indicating primary content of a voice message...

1. Indicate the primary content of a message (e.g. voice, fax, text, video,
etc.)  This information could be used to help a receiving message handling
agent to make decisions about how to present a new incoming message to its
recipient.  E.g. deliver it via a telephone handset with "message-waiting"
light, or send it to a printer;  selection of a desktop application to
handle the message;  etc.

2. Indicate which parts of a message are "critical" content.  For
disposition of a message to be deemed successful, all "critical" parts must
be presented.  Non-critical parts may be discarded and overall message
disposition deemed successful (possibly with a warning attached to the
disposition notification).

3. Indicate some parts of a message that contain metadata, or ancilliary
information about the message that is not part of the primary message
content.  This might be a fax cover page, or the spoken name of the sender
of a voice message.

One possible goal that I considered was a way to establish a multipart as a
message, with additional message-related semantics, as opposed to some
isolated chunk of content.  The rationale for this idea was that some of
the mechanisms implied above would only make sense in the context of a
message, and it may be desirable to have an explicit way to indicate this
context.  The counter-argument is that message context is often implicit --
a MIME object received by SMTP must be a message.

Do I properly understand the requirements here?

#g

------------
Graham Klyne
([email-masked])