Excerpts from internet.ietf-822: 17-Feb-92 Re: Content-transfer-encodi..
"Alain FONTAINE @sri.ucl (2327)
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..
You may be surprised to hear this, but I agree with you completely. The
amount of effort required to edit such a document as MIME is enormous,
and we all have to focus our own efforts somehow. Therefore MIME
contains three classes of things: 1) things we all agreed on without
controversy. 2) Things that I felt strongly enough to try to "push"
through. 3) Things that I didn't care much about but the rest of the
group was able to agree on so that I could simply incorporate it into
the draft. There are lots of things in category 3, and the CRC would
certainly have been one of them but for the fact that there was NO
consensus. In Santa Fe, the job of trying to shape a consensus position
on the MIC was given to someone else -- not me, and I forget who at the
moment. I have heard very little about it since then. Had a consensus
been arrived at, I would have been MORE than happy to include it, but it
wasn't on my personal "urgent" list and therefore didn't make it into
any of the 3 categories I just listed. (By the way, a big part of the
problem is that while nearly everyone would agree with you on the
desirability of some kind of message integrity check, there was very
strong disagreement about whether or not it should be part of base64.
Had you been in my shoes, you could have written up a draft pushing your
position and seen if it went down in flames. I wasn't so inclined, and
nobody else did so either.
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...
Yeah, I think this is sort of like what Churchill said about democracy:
it's the worst possible system except for all the others.... Don't
worry, I didn't disagree with you enough to feel flamed-at! -- Nathaniel