On Wed, 9 Sep 1998, Steve Dorner wrote:
- The draft makes an assertion that using file/fs will promote
interoperability between platforms. However, all the data typing,
canonicalization rules, etc, that we now do with MIME are not used. In
fact, all the interopability onus seems to be put on the receiving system.
Eg, I send you a Macintosh filesystem, one of the files has Macintosh type
'ttro'. From this, a receiving UNIX (eg) mailer is evidently supposed to
intuit that this is a text file and apply text canonicalization on
unpacking. Seems hard.
I think this is a critical point.
We already have 3 widely deployed archive formats: tar.gz, pkzip and
stuffit. I know there are free decoders for all three formats on Windows
and MacOS, and there are free decoders for at least the first two on Unix.
So what is gained by introducing a new archive format?
If the new media type simply copies the facilities of tar.gz, pkzip and
stuffit, then it will *reduce* the interoperability in the installed base
by introducing a new rarely-supported format.
The only way to gain with a new archive format is to design it to be cross
platform from start to finish, rather than encapsulating platform-specific
facilities which the existing formats do just fine. Incidentally, MIME
has already done much of this work for MIME body parts -- the most
important part of the problem being content-type.
- Chris