(This message is primarily for Jon and Martin but I've copied it to the
meta2 list cos there hasn't been much discussion of Warwick Framework here
of late :-) ).
The European BIBLINK project is in part concerned with the transmission of
metadata between publishers (of electronic resources) and national
libraries. As part of our work with the project we are investigating the
use of the Warwick Framework to provide the architecture for transmission
- in particular I have spent a little time looking at implementating this
using MIME as described by Jon and Martin in "MIME Implementation for the
Warwick Framework" at http://weeble.lut.ac.uk/MIME-WF.html.
So... I read the above paper, created a couple of sample metadata files,
configured up my system to assign correct MIME types to them, ran my
favorite mail user agent (Pine) and sent myself a test message with the
two files attached. It very nearly works as well! But not quite... the
problem is that Pine groups the separate body parts together using
multipart/mixed. The paper above suggests, quite rightly, that they
should be grouped as multipart/related (because we're grouping related WF
'packages' into a WF 'container' here - a MIME message containing several
WF 'containers' would group them using multipart/mixed).
Two other MIME aware mailers that I tried also grouped body parts together
using multipart/mixed and, as far as I can tell, none of them allow you to
use multipart/related instead.
I guess I was perhaps somewhat naive in assuming that I could build myself
a MIME based Warwick Framework implementation using the tools on my desk?
I can look at using metamail or a custom built perl script to build and
send the containers but I was hoping to keep things simple. Alternatively
I could say that the message is the 'container' and that the simple body
parts are the 'packages' but that's a horrible hack that probably doesn't
deserve to be called Warwick Framework!
Any comments/ideas?
Andy.
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