On 20 April 2003 20:22 Nathaniel Borenstein wrote
Yes, that's why I didn't recommend or even mention 8-bit transport. I
recommended binary transport. There's a big difference, and the
problems you describe all go away with binary transport. You're
arguing with a straw man that nobody is advocating -- please check out
RFC 3030, as I mentioned in my previous message.
If you are claiming RFC3030 supports binary as opposed to 8-bit streams, try
reading it yourself sometime, explicitly this passage:-
A new SMTP verb, BDAT, is defined as an alternative to the "DATA" command
of
[RFC821]. The BDAT verb takes two arguments. The first argument indicates
the
length, in octets, of the binary data chunk. The second optional argument
indicates that the data chunk is the last.
That makes it pretty clear that the proposal supports the transport of
octets, (an 8-bit transport), not of bits (a binary transport). A binary
transport would allow me to transmit 37 bits, or 125 bits, or 10725412973
bits or indeed any number of bits, not just a multiple of 8 bits. For an
example of a binary transport mechanism look at the definition of the HDLC
protocol (or IBM's SDLP, for that matter, if that's easier for you to find)
which are designed explicitly to permit units of any number of bits to be
transferred.
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