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Re: MIME and PEM

1992-06-06 10:16:42
Not being a PEM expert, and having no strong opinion about PEM, I'm
mostly trying to keep out of this discussion so as not to make things
any more difficult.  One clarification, however:

Excerpts from internet.ietf-822: 6-Jun-92 MIME and PEM Stephen D
Crocker(_at_)tis(_dot_)co (10763)

      Comment: MIME could have defined a type for MIME headers and
      not defined two recursive types.  What is now a "message"
      would be just a multipart with exactly two parts, one of which
      is a header and the other is whatever you wish.  This is not a
      quibble; the current MIME approach is much more
      straightforward.  I'm just putting the issue of PEM headers in
      context.

We had moved in this direction at one point, but backed off.  In
particular, it is very important, if you want to do X.400 gatewaying
properly, that the "parts" in mutlipart messages are NOT to be
considered as encapsulated messages.  I suspect that you have about as
much desire to get into the details of X.400 gatewaying as I have to get
into the details of PEM, but anyway that's the reason we couldn't do it
that way, just so you know.  -- Nathaniel

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