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Re: yEnc (was RE: mail vs. news ???)

2003-02-24 16:19:22

        On Mon, 24 Feb 2003 09:39:04 GMT
        archiver(_at_)i3w(_dot_)com (Juergen Helbing) said...

On Sun, 23 Feb 2003 16:36:07 GMT, you wrote:

Yes, I have been round this before. It is clear that, even if the Yenc
people were to use
   Content-Transfer-Encoding: x-yenc
which they could start doing tomorrow, things would be much simpler.

For whom would be things "much simpler" ?

People writing news user agents, who would not need to
decode the Subject line, but rather would just look at the
Content-Transfer-Encoding line, which they have to look at anyway just
for this purpose. And everybody else who came across these articles and
who currently fails to understand the strange things in the Subject
line, but who would understand the CTE header and realise that there was
a new encoding available that they should get hold of.

And also the users, who could just write subject headers pertaining to
what their binary was about.


They seem
convinced that the IETF is totally against all change, and that they would
be heavily sat upon, and that the whole process would be far too
cumbersome and time consuming, 

If I'm looking at the latest discussions about USEFOR here then I
really dont want to imagine what could happen to a yEnc RFC.

The discussions are far worse on the Usefor list :-( .

And there is one thing you should never forget:


So please apologize that I dont want to be one who is messing up the
worldwide eMail system 'just to save 25% of bandwidth' - which is
negligable for Mail - but important for Binary Newsgroups (where yEnc
belongs to).

I doubt anyone will bother to implement Yenc in pure mail newsreaders.
Indeed, your standard should say that it SHOULD be implemented in
News and MAY be implemented in mail. And that gateways to mail should
downsize it to base 64.

But, as I already said, if you call it x-yenc, you don't even need a
standard or permission from the IETF or anything.

and "hey it works fine already, we don't need no stinkin' IETF". 

Yes, yEnc is working pretty good. It is saving Gigs of bandwidth every
day for USENET. 

FYI: Usenet does not need IETF. The neticens there have invented many
nice things on Usenet even without the admins and us - the developers.

These people dont _care_ about us (including myself).

I know the feeling :-( .

All very sad, but that's how some people regard
the IETF. So we are stuck with indicating the presence of yEnc by a flag
in the Subject header. It is a mess.

Update: More and more posts appear on Usenet even without the
mandatory keyword "yEnc" in the subject line. It is necessary to scan
the body.

Which is why you should be using the header that was designed for the
purpose.



Usenet is not eMail.
And Binary Usenet is not Usenet.

But they all have to coexist.


Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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