Personally, I think that this sort of approach to encodings is a big
mistake. First of all, it vastly increases the set of transformations a
UA may have to understand in order to just restore data to its "native"
state. By opening up wider sets of transformations, it opens up much
wider problems of transformation definition (which uuencode? which
ccompress?) and potential interoperability problems. Second, it
inflicts a UNIX paradigm (pipes) and, in the versions presented, a set
of UNIX transformations (uuencode, compress) on the whole world
including non-UNIX systems.
That's why I opposed this idea earlier, and why I still oppose it. --
Nathaniel