Article View: comp.mail.mime
Article #19Re: X.400 and multimedia mail
From: Henry Spencer
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 1992 22:11
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 1992 22:11
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In article <1gfg5uINN5ej@calvin.NYU.EDU> roy@mchip00.med.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes:
> What ever happened to btoa? It came out a bunch of years ago, but
>never seemed to catch on. As I remember, it was touted as a replacement for
>uuencode with the advantage that it only incurred a 5/4ths expansion instead
>of 4/3rds. Was there some reason why MIME didn't use btoa?
The MIME people worked hard to find an encoding that would survive *anywhere*
in the known RFC822-mail universe. This is a lot harder than it looks, when
you start thinking ugly thoughts like "Bitnet". Many of the non-alphanumeric
ASCII characters are vulnerable to mangling in gateways. You can't beat six
bits/character (i.e. 4/3 expansion) by much without using vulnerable
characters.
--
"God willing... we shall return." | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
-Gene Cernan, the Moon, Dec 1972 | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry
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Newsgroups: comp.mail.mime Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!wupost!cs.utexas.edu!torn!utzoo!henry From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: X.400 and multimedia mail Message-ID: <Bz7xn0.7H5@zoo.toronto.edu> Date: Sun, 13 Dec 1992 22:11:21 GMT References: <1992Dec11.153138.2198@ericsson.se> <1galsqINNr88@gap.caltech.edu> <Bz6H65.EnH@zoo.toronto.edu> <1gfg5uINN5ej@calvin.NYU.EDU> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology Lines: 15