On Sep 12, 5:56pm, Keith Moore wrote:
Subject: Re: 8-bit transmission in NNTP
I see no reason to have news use a different solution than e-mail.
It only creates unnecessary complications for gateways.
Well, basically it is the same, but with some improvements and
enhancements. MIME should be enhanced in the same way, to remedy
the inconveniciences found in 2 years of MIME practice.
If you can get consensus in the IETF that MIME should be modified as
you suggest, I have no problem with the same extensions being added to
netnews.
I agree that Netnews should track e-mail. It is important that the two
be consistent.
But I suspect that, barring unfixable technical flaws in RFC 1522,
any change at this point would cause more inconvenience than it
would alleviate.
Keith
-- End of excerpt from Keith Moore
I'm sure that someday there will be an enhanced MIME. Perhaps then is
the right time to address this.
It is not totally clear to me that doing Base64 encoding on binary
attachments is the right long term thing to do. I've seen criticism
of MIME (as compared to X.400) in that MIME requires such an encoding.
X.400 has its own ASN.1 encoding, but that does not involve translating
every byte of a (potentially large) binary attachment.
Are there any comparisons of performance of X.400 and SMTP/text
and SMTP/MIME/Base64 on similar hardware?
Thanks,
Mark