[Haskell-cafe] Status of MIME Strike Force

[Arie Peterson]

Jeremy Shaw wrote:

>> What is the status of the MIME Strike Force?
>
> Currently it is on hold while I work on some other higher priority
> projects. But, I do hope to get back to it soon. (Or, perhaps someone
> else will have time to work on it).

OK. Good to hear it is still alive, if slumbering.


I know nothing about MIME, so I will make some comments ;-).

> One way to express a filter that modifies an existing message is the
> following:
>
>> exampleHeaders =
>>    ( (setHeader (Subject "whee")) .
>>      (setHeader (Subject "bork")).
>>      (addHeader (Keywords ["baz", "bar", "bam"])) .
>>      (addHeader (Keywords ["zip", "zap", "zop"]))
>>    )
>
> where setHeader ensures that a header only appears once, and addHeader
> appends the header, leaving existing instances alone. The type system
> ensures that you can never call addHeader on (Subject
> "whee"). Unfortunately, that code seems a bit verbose.

If you want to signify that some headers are added and others replaced -
which seems a good idea - then it's not so bad, is it? Perhaps replacing
'setHeader' by 'set', and removing some parentheses, it's pretty minimal:

  modifyHeaders = set (Subject "whee") . add (Keywords ["quux","blub"])

Anyway, I wouldn't bother too much about the exact syntax, at this stage.


> A whole other area I have not dealt with yet is data-mining and
> filters that depend on the values of existing fields. For example:
>
>  1. find all the headers that contain the string XXX
>  2. find all the Keywords fields and merge them into a single Keywords
> field

Right. Another one:

  3. Examine the contents of a certain header, and use the result to
modify other headers. (Think of a spam filter, for instance.)

I'm not sure what types of transformation we need to support. (I
personally only need 'pure' parsing and composing, not this 'on-the-fly'
transforming, but it is clearly necessary for some applications.)

There are many similar problems. Suppose you need to change a CSS file, by
changing RGB colours to corresponding HSL colours, but only within certain
media sections and selectors. Furthermore, layout/whitespace/comments must
be preserved as much as possible. As with modifying an e-mail on-the-fly,
this cannot be done by first parsing the whole thing, then applying the
transformation as a pure function, then unparsing.

I have a vague idea on a way to deal with this, using some kind of
stateful stream processor. I'll try to code it up some time; maybe it
could be useful for MIME handling as well.


Greetings,

Arie