ietf-822
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Re: New I-D Transfer Encoding for MIME

1998-09-09 12:24:25
On Sat, 9 Sep 2000, Al Costanzo wrote:
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.

I support the general idea of a compressing CTE, although the rules for
when it is permitted have to be carefully drawn up so that it doesn't
create compatibility problems (in particular, it MUST NOT be used without
some form of prior agreement between the sender and recipient).

I am curious why you're proposing LZJU90, instead of Deflate/gzip (RFC
1951).  Deflate as the distinct advantage of already being documented in
an RFC and having freely available source code.  A simple mapping can
convert deflate to gzip and take advantage of the fact that gzip decoders
are available on all platforms.

I also object to the use of a base64 alphabet different from the base64
alphabet defined in the MIME standard.  And if compression is the intent,
then perhaps something more aggressive than base64 should be applied to
the output of the compresssion operation.

                - Chris