At 12:24 PM 9/21/95, spock wrote:
The multipart/alternative construct was deemed more useful for backward
compatability to non-MIME readers. This is because the "alternative" part
is in readable ASCII. The use of multipart/signed infers a requirement
that the "signed" text be transported from sender to recipient intact.
For MOSS, the signed object will be canonicalized for signature, but if it
is a plain text object, canonicalization generally won't garble the text so
that someone reading with a non-MIME MUA can't read the text.
Just because the header says the part is signed, doesn't mean it can't be
understood without authenticating the signature. :-)
If the signed object is something like a spread sheet, someone with a
non-MIME MUA wouldn't be able to interpret it, even if it weren't signed.
It seems to me, there is no alternative for S/MIME, because even a signed
text object is encoded in ASN.1. So for S/MIME, to deal with
MIME-challenged MUAs there has to be an plain text part which can't be
signed.
john noerenberg
jwn2(_at_)qualcomm(_dot_)com
noerenberg.j (Applelink)
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