Kent Crispin <kent(_at_)songbird(_dot_)com> writes:
On Sun, Nov 23, 1997 at 12:40:33PM +0000, Ian Brown wrote:
[...]
MIME 1) already exists, 2) is far more widely used than Armor, and 3)
won't need to be implemented by an OP-MIME system as the mailer will do
the work for you.
If the mailer does all the work for you, then why argue that mime is
necessary as a part of the OP spec? I don't mean that to be flip; I am
asking for actual technical reasoning, maybe even with a concrete
example. How, precisely, do you imagine OP interacting with a mime
mailer such that OP has to know mime?
I think that is a good point, and that for the purposes of mailer
integration MIME could be defined to be outside the standard.
Armor could then be the MAY legacy backwards compatibility mode for
people who are not yet using a MIME aware mailer.
However, there is another 7 bit transport problem which gets solved by
ascii armor currently: cut and paste operations on keys, eg look up on
a keyserver manually, or via finger, or appended to a mail.
This could actually be acheived with MIME in place of armor -- just
include the Content-Type: headers and skip the checksum, and it's
basically the same thing.
This would then need minimal MIME handling ability within the standard
and an implementation -- to be able to accept MIMEd key packets.
Doesn't seem like a big deal implementation-wise -- the complexity
saving of removing the checksum probably more than compensates for
having to output and parse a fixed Content-Type: string.
Adam