ietf-nntp Selective download of MIME multipart/alternative in NNTP

[Jacob Palme]

Both Netscape and Microsoft Outlook Express, in their
latest versions, support sending of messages in the
multipart/alternative format, with one choice being plain
text and the other choice being text/html or
multipart/related containing text/html plus images.

The issue of whether to like or dislike HTML in news is
very controversial, but whether you like it or not, it will
probably become more common when these two important
products produce articles in this format. One of the
complaints against HTML, and in particular HTML combined
with multipart/alternative, is that this increases the
download time. One solution to this would be if NNTP
allowed a setting to download only the plain text or only
the HTML branch of a multipart/alternative. Or, to make it
more general, a command in NNTP to tell the server to only
download one choice, for all MIME multipart/alternative,
together with some kind of preference list of which choices
the user prefers to download. I was mainly thinking of
using this for a client to reduce the download time, but it
might conceivably also be used by servers who only want to
download one alternative to their server data base to save
storage space.

Would this be a possible or suitable extension to NNTP? Or
can it already be done?

I am not a member of the ietf-nntp mailing list, so please
include my e-mail address in replies to this message.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jacob Palme <jpalme at dsv.su.se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme