Recently, a fair number of pictures on some newsgroups (notably
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.d and alt.sex.pictures.d, of course) have
started showing up in something that is pretty nearly MIME format.
While in general this is something we should all be pleased about, I'm
dismayed to note that instead of base64, they're using a
content-transfer-encoding value of "x-uue". Yes, it's uuencode.
Now, the posts in question do NOT use a MIME-Version header, so they
can't fairly be criticized as advertising MIME-compliance but failing to
deliver. However, I'm a bit alarmed at the "x-uue" usage. I can
understand why people might want to use it for now, given that most
people don't yet have software for decoding base64. On the other hand,
my "mmencode" software, which comes with the metamail distribution,
provides a simple and trivial way to decode base64 and quoted-printable
data, and could easily be reposted to these newsgroups.
What I'm wondering is whether we, as the IETF working group that
developed MIME, should be taking a position on this. For example, we
could post something to the newsgroups saying how happy we are that
they're using MIME, and including, for example, a copy of the mmencode
program. We could even post a detailed explanation of WHY we want to
discourage the use of uuencode in favor of base64. I thought of doing
something like this myself, but I wanted to get the feel of the working
group first, and find out whether or not we wanted to try to speak with
one voice on this issue.
My inclination is to get out in front of this as much as possible by
making such postings to the newsgroups. On the other hand, I also don't
want to alienate our friends in the netnews community (Hi, friends!) by
recommending any particular MIME use in netnews at this stage of the
game. I'd be interested to hear what anybody else would like to do. --
Nathaniel