Steve,
It's good that this issue is coming up for explicit discussion.
It should indeed be possible to build a minimal MIME reader and writer
that handles just what's necessary for MIME-PEM, and doesn't handle
audio, video, image, complex forms of text or any applications other
than PEM, and it should be possible to do so with roughly the same
cost as the existing 1421 machinery.
But until there's a worked example, I'm reluctant to assert this claim
too loudly. My own belief, however, is that this indeed doable, and
it remains on our queue to demonstrate. We definitely have not given
up on this tack.
Steve
Long ago it was a shared goal develop a version of MIME-PEm
that would be easily processed by users without full MIME capability,
and the first few drafts, I recall, tried thatb approach without
success. That idea also motivated Jeff's proposal, which he later
rescinded. The current I-Ds don't seem to consider this feature,
and so I assumed that we had given up on that tact.
Steve