I think that you always have to differ between sending DATA in
a certain format, for example a GIF picture, and a special
file which contains the data, in this example a Macintosh
file wich includes the GIF data. If you want to send the
picture, you should ALWAYS send it as image/gif. If you
want to send the Macintsh file (with all the fancy icons),
send it as a Macintosh file. You will never be able to
find a format which suits every need in this matter.
Yes I agree with this so far (except with the choice of always
using GIF -- GIF is lossy I thought!)
One interesting method is then BinHex 4.0 which is supported
in several applications, both commercial, shareware and public
domain siftware.
I was under the impression that BinHex was simply a text representation
for MacBinary. And that MacBinary was the `important' step in turning
the mac-file-with-many-forks into a byte stream. If so then Base64'ing
MacBinary seems to be the way to go, not encoding one text form with
another.
But using QP on BinHex should work very well. There should be only a
few characters needing special treatment. Also it uses, as I recall,
trailing blanks and these should be protected.
NOTE: I am not a MacIntosh person. I tried looking at this issue once
before (a few months back) and got confused.
<- David Herron <david(_at_)twg(_dot_)com> (work)
<david(_at_)davids(_dot_)mmdf(_dot_)com> (home)
<-
<- "That's our advantage at Microsoft; we set the standards and we can change
them."
<- Karen Hargrove of Microsoft quoted in the Feb 1993 Unix Review editorial.