Steve,
As a casual observer to the working group's activities, I'm curious about
the potential of a classic divide-and-conquor approach: It is my
understanding the there now is a Mime-only piece of work which specifies
some basic constructs for encryption and/or signature, and a PEM-specific
piece which specifies how to use the Mime framework for the PEM 'schema' to
obtain authentation and privacy pieces.
I can't pretend to assess the PEM-related specs. The MIME-related work,
however, I can. It has been going through incremental changes, with the
latest round being for the purpose of supporting the recursive use you
cited. That was a piece of functionality that had been considered during
previous work on the spec but the authors felt that a simpler approach
would suffice. Hence, the consensus decision of the working group to
require the recursive support didn't force any 'creativity' work for the
authors, merely the grunge of hammering out the writing detail.
In other words, there would seem to be very little risk for the generic
Mime spec and I wonder whether their evaluation and promotion could not be
treated separately, with the Mime part going very quickly, such as gaining
review during next week's meeting?
d/
--------------------
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg Consulting Phone: +1 408 246 8253
675 Spruce Dr. Fax: +1 408 249 6205
Sunnyvale, CA 94086 Email:
dcrocker(_at_)mordor(_dot_)stanford(_dot_)edu