[JDEV] A piece of MIME? (possible alternate solution)

[Patrick McCuller]

> From: jdev-admin at jabber.org [mailto:jdev-admin at jabber.org]On Behalf Of
> Jeremie
> >
> > 	I suggest we add several optional attributes to the <mime> tag,
> >
> > 		MIME-Version,
> > 		Content-Type,
> > 		Content-Transfer-Encoding,
> > 		Content-ID,
> > 		Content-Description.
>
> Absolutely, looks great except for Content-Transfer-Encoding.  My
> understand is that this is used to represent content that has been encoded
> in another format, such as gzip.  Since that's not legal in an XML stream,
> I'm not sure that aspect of MIME or attribute could be used.  Correct me
> if I'm wrong though, I'm no expert :)

	I think in this case you are mistaken. Take a look at RFC 2045 sections 6.2
and 6.3; there's a copy at :
http://www.oac.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/MIME/2045/rfc2045.html.

	My interpretation of all that is: Content-Transfer-Encoding indicates how
the original data - say, a gzip file or whatever - has been mangled into a
'mailable' format. There are only a handful of defined values for
Content-Transfer-Encoding identity, "quoted-printable", and base64. 'binary'
encoding is discouraged - it usually won't work - and we can specifically
disallow binary encoded MIME.

	From the RFC:

"The quoted-printable and base64 encodings transform their input from an
arbitrary domain into material in the "7bit" range, thus making it safe to
carry over restricted transports."

	So a chunk of MIME message body should always be XML legal text. :)


Patrick

>
> Everything else looks great though!
>
> Jer
>
>
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