Russ Albery wrote:
- MIME never got very much uptake on Usenet for attachments. The
binary newsgroups are almost universally uuencode or, these days,
yEnc. Base64 is rather rare and not at all popular. Binary readers
and posters, for reasons that I admit to really not understanding,
seem to have had no interest in the additional, cleaner semantics
offered by MIME attachments and continue to be happy with uuencode,
scanning the body for telltale lines, and doing guessing based on
file names. Part of this may be due to the fact that much of the
Usenet binary traffic is split across multiple posts and the MIME
message/partial content-type is ill-suited to Usenet for a wide
variety of reasons. Just splitting a uuencoded file into multiple
parts is a lot easier (although it certainly makes decoding a pain).
Note that there's absolutely no reason why yEnc (perhaps with optional
gzip functionality added in) can't be specified as a new
Content-Transport-Encoding as an alternative to base64. Further, if
message/partial doesn't do the job, than a new application/news-partial
could be specified. The issue is that the news community has rarely
found it useful or necessary to standardize common practices. I suggest
that this has led to a raft of interoperability problems (especially the
unlabeled 8-bit character sets).
The solution, I believe, is to get a base document published on the
standards track with no new functionality except for i18n and MIME
support, so that various implementers can start adding interoperable
features with new drafts (even if some are on the Experimental track).
The IMAP WG, though not perfect, is an example of how this can and
should be done.
- dan
--
Dan Kohn <mailto:dan(_at_)dankohn(_dot_)com>
<http://www.dankohn.com/> <tel:+1-650-327-2600>