Re: Protocol Action: The Content-MD5 Header Field to Draft Standard

To be consistent with the rest of MIME terminology, I would suggest
the term "object", even though that term is not given an explicit
definition in 1521.  Something like "...the MD5 algorithm is computed
on the canonical form of the MIME entity's object."

A more substantial rewrite of the paragraph would be:

   To generate the value of the Content-MD5 field, the MD5 algorithm
   is computed on the canonical form of the MIME entity's object.  In
   particular, this means that the sender applies the MD5 algorithm on
   the data immediately after conversion to canonical form, before
   applying any content-transfer-encoding, and that the receiver also
   applies the MD5 algorithm on the canonical form, after undoing any
   content-transfer-encoding.  For textual data, this means the MD5
   algorithm must be computed on data in which the canonical form for
   newlines applies, that is, in which each newline is represented by
   a CR-LF pair.  The canonical encoding model of MIME is described in
   Appendix G of [1].

-- 
_.John G. Myers         Internet: jgm+(_at_)CMU(_dot_)EDU
                        LoseNet:  ...!seismo!ihnp4!wiscvm.wisc.edu!give!up