Question

1. What is the difference between an active document and a dynamic document? Give example of those document!
2. In electronic mail, what is MIME?
3. Why do we need POP3 or IMAP4 for electronic mail? Explain

Answer 1

Step 1

Active documents provide an extension to traditional embedded objects. The Active documents may be multipage and are displayed in the entire client area. They do traditional menu negotiation, and can be edited in-place as well as in an open window in the server application. Instead of displaying as a small rectangle surrounded by a hatched border, Active documents are full frame and always in-place active. "E.g: JavaScript,Ruby etc

"A dynamic document is the product of a program run by a server as requested by a browser. An active document is the product of a program sent from the server to the client and run at the client site." E.g :Html,Xml etc

Step 2

Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) is a standard which was proposed by Bell Communications in 1991 in order to expand limited capabilities of email.

MIME is a kind of add on or a supplementary protocol which allows non-ASCII data to be sent through SMTP. It allows the users to exchange different kinds of data files on the Internet: audio, video, images, application programs as well.

Why do we need MIME?

Limitations of Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP):

1)SMTP has a very simple structure

2)It’s simplicity however comes with a price as it only send messages in NVT 7-bit ASCII format.

3)It cannot be used for languages that do not support 7-bit ASCII format such as- French, German, Russian, Chinese and Japanese, etc. so it cannot be transmitted using SMTP. So, in order to make SMTP more broad we use MIME.

4)It cannot be used to send binary files or video or audio data.

Step 3

POP3 is a deprecated mail client protocol because of security issues and the way that it manages the messages between various devices. IMAP4, on the other hand, is the basic mail client protocol in use today, and it solves all of the problems left over from POP3.

POP3 was designed at a time when most people had only one computing device at their disposal; applications communicated with a mail server that had limited storage resources per email account. POP3 typically requires the user’s mail client to download all messages from the server, at which time the messages will be removed from the server and therefore only exist on the client which downloaded them. This leads to a major issue when everyone has a phone, a tablet, a laptop, and who knows what else, all trying to get to the same messages; in short, POP3 doesn’t work with today’s usage patterns.

IMAP4, on the other hand, keeps messages on the server, and essentially caches them on the device being used at time of reading the message. This means that you can open the same message (and attachments, I might add) on your phone, your laptop, and anywhere else, via mobile app, desktop application, or web mail client. Same messages everywhere, much more in line with today’s device usage habits.

All major ISPs and 3rd-party mail systems (including Google, Yahoo, and many others) are using some form of IMAP mail system on their networks, because it is easier to manage and maintain, gives the users access to their entire mailbox from any device, and benefits from modern protocols. The only major exception is Microsoft, which uses a variation of their own Exchange Server system for Live Mail (what used to be Hotmail) and Outlook365, but even then that’s similar in effect to IMAP.