On Thu, 13 Feb 92 21:48:43 EET you said:
Now, the main reason I'm answering you is the CRC issue: We all agreed
that a CRC for base64 would be a good thing, but we were unable to agree
on one. It is, however, the kind of thing that can be phased in later
without much pain, which is why decided to defer it. (Imagine a
"Content-CRC:" header, for example.)
I don't think that would be a too good way to do it, I'd prefer to see it
a part of base64. That way you could "sprinkle" the checksums into the
encoded material as tight or as loose as you want.
Ah, the 'checksum' or 'message integrity check' again...
(Is this a flame ? decide by yourself...)
The main editor of MIME is nsb. As a result, 'Richtext' is a part
of the base MIME specification, despite the fact that it has been challenged
by many for various reasons. Rest assured that if I had been the editor (I
*do* realize that the one putting himself is such a position is doing a
great service to the community, and bringing himself a lot of trouble)
some lightweight, incremental check would have been part of the base Base64
specification. Proposals have been made and challenged, mostly on the
argument that it is possible to build a better mousetrap. The net result
being that mice will continue to prolifer, since the rough spring and trigger
thingie was thus not included, and nobody knows how long it will take to
develop the superduper high performance version. If this one is published
someday, it will take very long to see a significative deployment, since it
will not have been part of the set of things required to make MIME work in
the first place. By the way : do you remember how simple and stupid the TCP
checksum is ? Nevertheless, this is the one everybody counts on..
Despite what you can think, I am not really flaming nsb here. My point is
that given the way things are developped, the final result is strongly
influenced by what the editor really wants to push, and what does not
seem important enough to him to make him fight. But one could also argue
that the very-big-comittee-with-mandatory-unanimity approach does give
results that are yet another order of magnitude (decimal) worse...
Sorry, I can't stay calm each time I am remembered that the check-whatever
has been left out... /AF