Excerpts from mail: 8-Jun-93 Re: Massive Content-Type de.. Carlyn M.
Lowery(_at_)zen(_dot_)z-c (1540)
If we combine some of the ideas which have been discussed, a general
solution for specifying compression could be to have one new
content-transfer-encoding, and allow a parameter:
Content-Transfer-Encoding: compress64; compress-algorithm=LZ77
Yes, but the real point here is, do we WANT a general solution?
Personally, I think that in this case generality is a bad thing, because
the possible gain -- quick access to future improvements in compression
technology -- is more than offset by the possible pain -- a loss in
interoperability due to a proliferation of mutually incompatible
compression algorithms. It's a lot like why we chose base64 INSTEAD of
uuencode, rather than in ADDITION to uuencode, except in this case the
implementation of new algorithms is much tougher, so the stakes are even
higher. -- Nathaniel