From the Chair,
It is hoped that when the time comes to re-publish MIME with the
several corrections noted on this list, it can advance directly to
Draft Standard. Below is the current working definition used by the
IESG to evaluate protocols for Draft Standard.
From RFC 1310
3.2.2. Draft Standard
A specification from which at least two independent and
interoperable implementations have been developed, and for
which adequate operational experience has been obtained, may be
elevated to the "Draft Standard" level. This is a major
advance in status, indicating a strong belief that the
specification is mature and will be useful.
A Draft Standard must be well-understood and known to be quite
stable, both in its semantics and as a basis for developing an
implementation. A Draft Standard may still require additional
or more widespread field experience, since it is possible for
implementations based on Draft Standard specifications to
demonstrate unforeseen behavior when subjected to large-scale
use in production environments.
This is understood to mean that the specification must be completely
implemented and all features known to be interoperable. Any feature
not tested must either be deleted from the specification or the
specification must remain as a proposed standard. Bug fixes and small
changes or enhancements which have been implemented and tested are
generally allowed.
Quoted-binary is a new feature which has yet to be implemented and if
included in MIME will need to be implemented and tested by at least two
independent implementations before MIME can be advanced. Given the
absence of internet-standard 8bit software I doubt this will occur in
the timeframe we are hoping for.
As Yet-another-contributor
There was an express desire for One transfer encoding. This was seen
as too restrictive given two general classes of data, human readable
with 7 bit software and all other and so QP and Base64 were defined.
With each new transfer encoding, the complexity of all mail readers and
all gateways is increased. Remember, all MIME transfer encodings MUST
be supported by ALL MIME conforming readers to insure interoperability.
I do not believe that the increase in complexity to optimize the
sending of Binary data over 8 bit paths is worth the saved bandwidth.
I'd rather see efforts go into defining a newMTP that will expressly
deal with Binary Data.
Greg Vaudreuil