Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!wuarchive!decwrl!ucbvax!THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM!nsb From: nsb@THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM (Nathaniel Borenstein) Newsgroups: comp.mail.multi-media Subject: PostScript as MMmail (new subject) Message-ID: Date: 15 Aug 90 11:41:44 GMT References: <9008142314.AA08747@nsl.pa.dec.com> Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Distribution: inet Organization: The Internet Lines: 28 I hate to say anything nice about using PostScript as a multi-media mail standard, but I think the main problem with PostScript portability, in this context, is that the language can make reference to external resources (such as library files) which don't necessarily follow the program to another site. This is a problem that almost any language could have, and could be solved in two ways for multimedia mail: 1. Disable all such features. In particular, this means the language can't have a library. 2. Modify the transport layer so that it recognizes the resources required by each message, and packages them up to send to the next site if necessary. Thus if mail requires the "foobar" library, the first MTA will ask the second MTA if it has the foobar library (appropriate version number, presumably) and, if not, will transmit it to the receiving site. The second approach is somewhat flawed because it's hard to be sure two versions of a library are identical. However, it closely resembles what mail transport will have to look like when costly media such as video are sent through the mail anyway, in my belief. (You don't want to put the video in the body, because many steps of the transport may be within a domain where the video is uniformly accessable using some kind of token.) At any rate, I doubt that PostScript is any less portable than any other representation that permits external references. It seems to be a pretty well-defined language. -- Nathaniel