Re: MML multipart tag -- what does it do?

[Nuutti Kotivuori <nuutti.kotivuori@smarttrust.com>]

Kai Großjohann wrote:
> On Fri, 03 Aug 2001, ShengHuo ZHU wrote:
> 
>> If there are more than one top-level (implicit or explicit) parts
>> in the message, you will get a multipart/mixed Content-Type.
> 
> Hm.  So...
> 
> Either the body with its <part> and <multipart> tags is a forest or
> it's a tree.  If it's a tree, then the Content-Type of the whole
> message is the same as the root of the tree.
> 
> If it's a forest, then the Content-Type of the whole message is
> multipart/mixed.
> 
> Is that right?

Probably, if you think it like that. The check is simply:
(cont is the result of mml-parse)

,----
| (if (and (consp (car cont))
|          (= (length cont) 1))
|     (mml-generate-mime-1 (car cont))
|   (mml-generate-mime-1 (nconc (list 'multipart '(type . "mixed"))
|                               cont)))
`----

So a multipart/mixed part is added to contain the whole parse-tree if
there's more than one top level part.

> But how do we explain this to the user?

"If there is more than one toplevel part, your message is sent as a
multipart/mixed message containing the parts, otherwise the toplevel
part is the content of the message."

Atleast I can't put it better than that. In any case, the normal user
hardly understands anything about multipart/mixed, let alone something
as complicated as this.

And there is a problem on this as well. For example if the user wants
to sign his message, he adds this to the beginning of his message:

<#part sign=pgpmime>

And everything is fine when he sends normal messages. But if his
messages contain multiple parts, that above markup will only sign the
first part. He must write instead:

<#multipart sign=pgpmime>

But if he puts this in a normal message, he will get a multipart/mixed
message with just one part. And I have no idea what would happen with
a <mml> part or something.

So any ideas on how this could be made clearer?

-- Naked