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Helper Applications

The web browser uses the MIME type to determine how to view the body of the message. Some of the documents are viewed by the browser itself, like text/html which describes HTML documents. In other cases, the browser has to start up another application. From here on, we'll describe how Mosaic and Netscape do this. First, it saves the incoming message body to a temporary file. It then scans the global and local mailcap files to determine which application is used to view the given MIME type. The application, which must take a file name on the command line, is then executed. When the application exits, the temporary file is deleted.



Justin Gullingsrud
Tue Apr 6 09:22:39 CDT 1999