IMO ASCII-armored PGP is not a competing standard on encoding
techniques, rather it is an integral part of PGP and security.
Sorry, I may be a bit dense but do not understand this statement.
A PGP-encrypted message may be transmitted in binary or may be
converted to an RFC 821/22 compliant form via ASCII Armoring.
This may also be done with UUENCODE, XXENCODE, or any of a
number of different mechanisms from TekHex to YAAA - all of
which were designed to avoid filtering.
Now in my worldview, a mailreader or universal decryptor needs
to be recursive, that is it needs to examine a file for a format
that it recognizes, perform a conversion if necessary, and then
examine the result to determine if another conversion needs to
be invokes.
Further, it should be modular so that new mechanisms may be added
or old one removed as desired. My though is that an IETF standard
should be flexible in permitting addition of new mechanisms with
as little fuss as possible.
The main difference I see between AsciiArmouring and MIME is that
the former is desinged to enclose a single PGP module while the
latter can contain multiple elements which different charactoristics.
This IMNSHO is a Good Thing.
Perhaps I am missing something but why not a MIME module type for
AsciiArmouring ?
Personally, I agree that it is something that was added at a time when
there were no real standards (though UUENCODE could have been used)
and PGP was a command-line standalone.
However I also suspect that recognition of the type and provision for
reduction to binary as a single pass would take so little code as to be
negligible (easy for me to say since have not tried to do it 8*).
However I do not understand what the controversy is about since it
seems to be a simple matter of yet another code form.
Warmly,
Padgett