I thought that the IETF had a mandate to at least describe
existing practice before leaping off into new solutions.
--Ed
Note that base64 is very similar to xxencode, posted to alt.sources in
february 1990. xxencode uses +-0-9A-Za-z, with a length byte per line,
almost like uuencode, while base64 uses A-Za-z0-9+/ without a length byte,
using a peculiar = convention to represent the length. I do not know why the
original base64 encoding differs from xxencoding.
--
Luc Rooijakkers Internet:
lwj(_at_)cs(_dot_)kun(_dot_)nl
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science UUCP: uunet!cs.kun.nl!lwj
University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands tel. +3180652271