It seems that a new MIME standard for content-transfer-encoding that
would indicate a compressed base64 type ala gzip could be nice.
Creative minds might even improve the efficiency of base64 at the
same time, if we don't have to worry about translation into EBCDIC
anymore.
it's been discussed many times; afaik the biggest problem is that nobody
has bothered to write up a concrete proposal. the second biggest problem,
of course, is that it would break lots of existing software.
I actually have it written up, but have never bothered to release the
specification because of the deployment problem.
We need a deployment mechanism first. And that's precisely what we're trying
to get through RESCAP.
Ned