Neil Katin writes:
Excuse me for a foolish question, but the reissuing of the RFC forms
document made me think about the relationship between this proposal
and the RFC-MIME document.
Is there any interest or activity with respect to restating PEM to
make use of the message format facilities? As someone working with
both PEM and MIME, it would make life much easier if these proposals
were aligned somehow.
Not a foolish question, but I don't believe that any changes should be
made to PEM at this time which would render it dependent on concurrent
support and use of MIME. I think that such a course of action would
inevitably delay PEM standardization (an activity which has been
underway for several years and is now in the final stages of
convergence) and implementation, and would further limit the prospective
PEM user base to a subset of the (emerging) MIME community rather than
the broader existing mail base. Given a goal of widespread and timely
availability of PEM, these results seem undesirable.
I don't consider myself a detailed MIME expert, but informal
conversations at the San Diego IETF suggested two desirable coexistence
properties that would hold without changes to the PEM specifications:
(1) that PEM body parts can be accomodated within MIME-structured
messages and (2) that MIME-structured messages can be protected (in
their entirety, though at the cost of redundant encoding) using PEM.
--jl