Greg Vaudreuil writes:
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.
Given the intended similarity to quoted-printable, it should be trivial
(ie, a very small amount of work) to add quoted-8bit to an existing
implementation supporting quoted-printable. The problem is then to find an
8-bit transport channel to test interoperability over. I'm not sure,
but I would guess that some people from ietf-smtp have preliminary
implementations of the proposed 8-bit extensions to smtp. Would it suffice
for two quoted-8bit implementations to interoperate over such a transport?
If so, it should be possible to meet the timeframe.
It is my feeling that such a small addition should not impact the
standard status, especially given the desirability of having *all*
transfer encodings specified in the base document.
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.
This is supposed to be the 8-bit smtp; I don't think ietf-smtp wants to
replace smtp by something else, or they would have done this by now.
--
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