Excerpts from internet.ietf-822: 29-Oct-91 checksums in RFC XXXX James M
Galvin(_at_)tis(_dot_)com (993)
No one has commented on my suggestion to allow checksumming to be
independent of any other processing, ie a separate RFC be created that
specifies an application that does checksumming and it can decide to create
a new header or be a new content type or whatever.
Personally, I totally love this idea, but at this stage all it takes to
get that response from me is the magic 2 words "separate RFC".
I am a little troubled by the idea that decoding will be mandatory,
because I'm not sure how it could possibly be enforced, or why. If you
send me something that is checksummed, and I ignore the checksum, the
odds are that nobody will ever know. That's a strong temptation to lazy
implementors...