ietf-822
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Re: Content-Transfer-Encoding and yEnc

2002-04-03 11:35:13


Keith Moore wrote:

IMHO, message/partial shouldn't be used for fragmented messages that
use 8bit encodings, a new content-type should be defined for this
purpose.  but we shouldn't feel compelled to adhere to the "no nested
encodings" rule for this new type, because the normal implementation
of this type would be to decode the c-t-e for the fragment, store the
decoded fragment in a file, and when all of the fragments are present,
concatenate them into a message.

That's pretty much the approach that has been focused on in the
news.software.nntp newsgroup, where most of this discussion originated.
What is being considered is an application/partial (or /whatever du jour)
where each fragment identifies a byte-range. If a large multi-part file is
posted and a fragment is lost, anybody can repost the fragment and the gap
will be filled. Benefits to this approach are that any CTE can be used to
encode the fragments, application/partial will be treated as opaque by
non-conformant MUAs, and so forth. At this point it is arguing about
details and worrying about problems.

http://www.exit109.com/~jeremy/news/binaries/ has an essay

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/