9/9/1998
Greetings to all,
I am Al Costanzo one of the co-authors of RFC 1505. Some may remember that
in the past I opposed MIME placement on standards track.
Five years later, MIME is widely deployed, I may have been wrong :-).
I am willing to admit to everyone that I was quite pig-headed back then
(maybe still am in some areas but I am working on it!). A number of IETF
members contacted us ( the authors of RFC1505 ) and 'suggested' we redefine
a few RFC1505 items for MIME.
I for one refused the request, consulted the other co-authors and basically
did nothing in this area since the RFC was release in 1993.
Consider the above an apology for being pig-headed and not listening.
The first two Internet drafts I submitted are the beginning of this work.
* draft-costanzo-lzju90-mime-01.txt -
is a document that redefines LZJU90 as a new transfer encoding for MIME.
This transfer encoding also contains compression. This is an item that was
requested in 1993.
This is the second public iteration of the document.
LZJU90 is in the true public domain, there is no patent on it. A patent
search was
made.
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* draft-costanzo-fs-mime-00.txt - UNLIKE the LZJU90 draft, this draft is
preliminary, therefore please treat it as such. It is the beginning of a
directory attachment concept
for MIME.
There were many rewrites to this document. This is the first public release.
The attempt is/was to create a standardized mechanism to attach directory
structures to email that:
* does not require multi-encodings to survive mail transport
* does not rely on modular programs (plug-ins) for functionality
Currently, people (users) either create a tar ball or use some program like
pkZip, Gzip or what-have-you to move a directory structure via email. The
problem with this method is that both the receiver and sender MUST have the
same software (or at least the software must support the same 'encoding
scheme') to achieve the transfer properly.
Granted, many programs are freely downloadable....
However, my intent is to create/define a standard mechanism that may be
embedded into the mailer program's GUI directly.
I have had many requests for this functionality from 'users'.
I have received a bit of interest on this from implementers.
I invite the Internet community to review the documents.
You may send constructive comments to al(_at_)akc(_dot_)com
Since I am very mindful of email lists, if you would like to carry on this
discussion off this list, you may subscribe to a list we have set up
just for comments on these drafts.
To subscribe send a message to the File System Attachment list:
fsa-request(_at_)donet(_dot_)com
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the instructions it sends.
Thank You All for your kind attention in this matter.
-Al
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