Compression: It was widely felt that, in addition to quoted-printable and base64, there
should be a compressed encoding mechanism, possibly based on the UNIX compress
facility. No such mechanism is currently specified, both because of a lack of
compression expertise among the authors and because of the uncertain legal/patent
situation regarding the commonly-used compression algorithms.
Uuencode: Initially, many people questioned the use of the new base64 scheme instead
of the widely-available "uuencode" mechanism. Uuencode was considered and rejected
for several reasons. It is nowhere well-specified, and in fact there are several uuencode
implementations that do not interoperate. The output of uuencode is not robust across
many mail gateways, owing to problems of character set and the cavalier way many
relays treat "white space" in message bodies. It is not uncommon for uuencoded files to
arrive at a remote site in a form from which they simply cannot be decoded. The base64
format was designed specifically to avoid the problems associated with uuencode.
Number of Content-types: There was a significant initial controversy about the overall
number of content-types to be permitted. Some favored a "let a thousand flowers bloom"
philosophy, while others wanted assurances that mail readers would have a good prospect
of recognizing the content-type. The subtype mechanism was a very successful
compromise that met the needs of both camps.
Relation to X.400: As stated previously, the new Internet mechanisms are the result of a
remarkable degree of cooperation between X.400 advocates, die-hard X.400 opponents,
and everyone in between. Not surprisingly, many issues of X.400 gatewaying have
arisen, but most of these have been deferred to a follow-up document that will specify
how X.400 gateways should use and interpret the new Internet mechanisms. However,
such issues were discussed long enough to determine that the new mechanisms would not
be too problematic for such gateways. Indeed, several aspects of the new mechanisms
are expressly designed to facilitate the implementation of such gateways.
Parts are not messages: The alert reader may have wondered why the "message" type
is necessary, in the presence of "multipart". The answer is that the parts of multipart
mechanisms are explicitly specified as not being actual RFC 822 messages, but rather a
new type of object (parts) that have very similar syntax. This distinction, it turns out, is
important for X.400 gateways. In the absence of this distinction, it is impossible to tell
the difference between a multipart message containing an audio part and a multipart
message containing an encapsulated message, the body of which is of content-type audio.
The part/message distinction allows a more precise semantic mapping between the
Internet and X.400 models.
Multipart boundaries: The boundary delimiters that separate the parts of a multipart
message have themselves been the subject of a remarkable amount of controversy. After
much debate, the current document specifies that the area before the first delimiter and
the area after the last delimiter is to be ignored, and that gateways -- particularly
gateways to X.400, which has no concept of such a "prefix" or "postscript" -- are free to
throw them away. It also specifies that a delimiter string appears as part of the
"Content-type: multipart" header field, and that the inter-part delimiter will consist of two
- 11 -
hyphens ("--") followed by that string, except that the last delimiter will end with an
additional pair of hyphens. Moreover, no such delimiter line is permitted to appear in
any of the parts, so that a composing agent must choose its delimiter with care. Although
these requirements may seem somewhat baroque, they are not without their reasons.
Given the possible presence of a non-meaningful suffix area at the end of the message,
the distinguished closing delimiter is particularly important.
Implications of 8-bit or binary transport: Those who worked on the extensions to
RFC 822 were sharply divided in their opinions regarding the desirability and feasability
of 8-bit or binary transport, i.e. extended SMTP. The group’s progress was made, in
large part, by agreeing to disagree on this issue. The result is that the current
mechanisms will work with 7-bit transport, but will move gracefully into an 8-bit world
should 8-bit transport become commonplace in accordance with the mechanisms
currently being drafted by the SMTP extensions working group. However, both groups
are essentially united in rejecting an alternative approach that has been advocated in a
recent Internet Draft [11] that essentially declares SMTP to permit 8-bit data, with no
provision for negotiation among SMTP servers to ensure that 8-bit data is not sent willynilly
to 7-bit implementations.
"Preferred" encodings: There have been proposals for a statement that certain
encoding types are "preferred" for certain content-types. These have not yet been
adopted, largely because it seems likely that common sense will suffice to encourage
people to use, for example, base64 rather than quoted-printable when transmitting audio
data. There have also been proposals for a mechanism by which mail sent in the future
8-bit world could include a specification of a "preferred" encoding should the mail ever
need to be passed off to a 7-bit mailer, but this too can probably be done without.
Non-ASCII header data: Many, particularly those from non-English speaking
countries, feel strongly that they should be able to use their own character sets in the
RFC 822 header area, particularly in human names and in the Subject specification.
However, doing so opens up signicant problems in terms of interoperability and
compatibility with older systems. A mechanism was finally agreed upon, and was
published as a separate document [12] that is generally used as a companion document
with MIME.
Character Set Specification: Character sets are a perennial source of controversy, and
the mail extensions discussion was no different. The working group settled on a
relatively small set of "legal" character sets, and hopes to avoid the proliferation of an
unnecessarily wide variety of character sets in international electronic mail. It is
expected, however, that several more character sets will inevitably be added to the base
set defined in MIME, as that set is fundamentally incomplete. (In particular, most of the
MIME designers sincerely hope that ISO 10646 will succeed in becoming the world’s
universal character set, and will be happy to see the future specification of the use of ISO
10646 in MIME, but were unwilling to pre-specify the details of that usage before ISO
10646 had itself been completely standardized.) There was also extended debate on the
proper way to specify the character set syntactically, and whether or not it should be
possible to specify, probably nonsensically, that an audio message, for example, uses a
- 12 -
specific character set.
Implementations and Interoperation
Various parties in the Internet mail community have been moving quickly to implement
the new standards. A publicly-available implementation by the author adds full MIME
support to over a dozen of the most common UNIX and DOS mail readers, including
Berkeley Mail, MH, XMH, Elm, Emacs rmail, and Andrew. This implementation
supports both encoding mechanisms, the multipart, image, message, audio, text, and
text/richtext content-types, and is easily configurable to handle more. At least three other
"freeware" versions are already available, and the author is aware of approximately three
dozen other implementations, most of them commercial, that were announced or under
development as of the writing of this paper. A large number of prominent vendors of
email software, in particular, have announced their intention to support MIME.
Summary and Future Prospects
The Internet RFC 822 extensions are the combined effort of a great many people who
share the goal of making multipart, multi-character set, multimedia email widely
available on the Internet. They specify mechanisms for including and encoding a wide
variety of types and formats of information in mail, but remain flexible and open to
future extensions. In particular, they are inherently far more open, flexible, and
extensible than solutions based on a single message format such as ODA [6].
Implementation experience so far suggests that the extensions are technically feasible
and relatively easy to implement.
Although MIME was designed for the severe constraints imposed by making multimedia
data interoperate in the bizarre world of electronic mail, the result is a general-purpose
format for representing almost any kind of data in a very robust manner. The growing
acceptance of MIME increases the likelihood that software to interpret MIME-format
data will be available on a wide variety of platforms, thus increasing the appeal of the
format for non-mail applications. There is no reason why MIME could not be used for
such non-mail applications as electronic publishing, multimedia database servers, and so
on. Indeed, interest in using MIME for such purposes has been wide and growing since
the publication of RFC 1341, the official MIME definition.
It remains to be seen, of course, whether MIME will ultimately succeed to make
multimedia mail ubiquitous. But if multimedia mail between software and hardware of
multiple vendors begins to interoperate regularly and reliably for a significant user
community, it is hard to see what benefit any mail software vendors or service providers
will find in bucking the trend.
Acknowledgements
The Internet mail extensions are the product of an Internet Extensions Task Force
Working Group. Far too many people participated in that effort to acknowledge all by
name. I particularly want to thank Ned Freed and Greg Vaudreuil for their tireless efforts
- 13 -
to bring this work to fruition, and Bob Kraut, Al Buzzard, and Stu Personick, my
การบีบอัด: ก็รู้สึกว่าที่ อย่างกว้างขวางนอกจากเสนอราคาสามารถพิมพ์ และ base64 มีควรเป็นระบบเข้ารหัสบีบอัด อาจตามประคบ UNIXสิ่งอำนวยความสะดวก ขณะนี้มีระบุ กลไกดังกล่าวทั้งสองเนื่องจากขาดการความเชี่ยวชาญรวม ระหว่างผู้เขียน และ เพราะกฎหมาย/สิทธิบัตรไม่แน่นอนสถานการณ์เกี่ยวกับอัลกอริทึมการบีบอัดที่ใช้กันทั่วไปUuencode: ครั้งแรก หลายคนสอบสวนการใช้โครงร่าง base64 ใหม่แทน-แพร่ "uuencode" กลไกการ พิจารณา และปฏิเสธ Uuencodeจากหลายสาเหตุ มันไม่มีที่ไหนระบุห้องพัก และในความเป็นจริงมีหลาย uuencodeการใช้งานที่ไม่สามารถทำงานร่วม ผลผลิตของ uuencode ไม่แข็งแกร่งทั่วเกตเวย์จดหมายหลาย owing ปัญหาของชุดอักขระและแบบคาวาเลียร์มากถ่ายทอดข้อมูลแบบรักษา "ช่องว่าง" ในเนื้อหาของข้อความ มันไม่ใช่สำหรับแฟ้ม uuencodedถึงที่อยู่ระยะไกลในรูปแบบที่พวกเขาก็ไม่สามารถถูกถอดรหัส แบบ base64รูปแบบถูกออกแบบมาโดยเฉพาะเพื่อหลีกเลี่ยงปัญหาที่เกี่ยวข้องกับ uuencodeจำนวนชนิดของเนื้อหา: มีข้อแรกสำคัญเกี่ยวกับโดยรวมจำนวนชนิดเนื้อหาจะได้รับอนุญาต บางคนชื่นชอบการ "ปล่อยให้พันดอกไม้บาน"ปรัชญา ในขณะที่คนอื่นต้องมาอ่านจดหมายจะมีโอกาสดีของการจดจำชนิดเนื้อหา กลไกชนิดย่อยประสบความสำเร็จมากปัญหาที่ตรงตามความต้องการของทั้งสองค่ายสัมพันธ์ของ X.400: ตามที่ระบุไว้ก่อนหน้านี้ กลไกที่อินเทอร์เน็ตใหม่เป็นผลของการโดดเด่นในระดับความร่วมมือระหว่าง X.400 สนับสนุน ฝ่ายตรงข้าม X.400 ตายแข็งและทุกคนในระหว่าง ไม่น่าแปลกใจ มีปัญหามากมายของ X.400 gatewayingเกิดขึ้น แต่ส่วนใหญ่เหล่านี้ได้ถูกเลื่อนออกไปติดตามเอกสารที่จะระบุวิธีเกตเวย์ X.400 ควรใช้ และแปลกลไกอินเทอร์เน็ตใหม่ อย่างไรก็ตามปัญหาดังกล่าวได้กล่าวถึงนานพอที่จะกำหนดว่า กลไกใหม่จะไม่จะมีปัญหามากเกินไปสำหรับเกตเวย์ดังกล่าว กลไกใหม่แน่นอน หลายแง่มุมถูกออกแบบมาเพื่อให้ง่ายต่อการใช้งานของเกตเวย์ดังกล่าวอย่างชัดเจนส่วนไม่ข้อความ: อ่านเตือนอาจได้สงสัยว่า ทำไมพิมพ์ "ข้อความ"มีความจำเป็น ในสถานะของ "หลายส่วน" คำตอบคือส่วนของหลายส่วนกลไกที่มีระบุอย่างชัดเจนเป็นไม่ จริงข้อ RFC 822 แต่การชนิดใหม่ของวัตถุ (ชิ้นส่วน) ที่มีไวยากรณ์ที่คล้ายคลึงกันมาก ความแตกต่าง มันเปิดออก คือสิ่งสำคัญสำหรับเกตเวย์ X.400 ในกรณีความแตกต่าง ไม่บอกความแตกต่างระหว่างข้อความหลายส่วนเสียงและหลายส่วนที่ข้อความที่ประกอบด้วยข้อความสรุป ร่างกายที่เป็นของชนิดของเนื้อหาเสียงการแมปความหมายที่ชัดเจนมากขึ้นระหว่างช่วยให้แตกส่วน/ข้อความรูปแบบอินเทอร์เน็ตและ X.400หลายขอบเขต: ตัวคั่นเขตแดนที่แยกส่วนของหลายส่วนเป็นmessage have themselves been the subject of a remarkable amount of controversy. Aftermuch debate, the current document specifies that the area before the first delimiter andthe area after the last delimiter is to be ignored, and that gateways -- particularlygateways to X.400, which has no concept of such a "prefix" or "postscript" -- are free tothrow them away. It also specifies that a delimiter string appears as part of the"Content-type: multipart" header field, and that the inter-part delimiter will consist of two- 11 -hyphens ("--") followed by that string, except that the last delimiter will end with anadditional pair of hyphens. Moreover, no such delimiter line is permitted to appear inany of the parts, so that a composing agent must choose its delimiter with care. Althoughthese requirements may seem somewhat baroque, they are not without their reasons.Given the possible presence of a non-meaningful suffix area at the end of the message,the distinguished closing delimiter is particularly important.Implications of 8-bit or binary transport: Those who worked on the extensions toRFC 822 were sharply divided in their opinions regarding the desirability and feasabilityof 8-bit or binary transport, i.e. extended SMTP. The group’s progress was made, inlarge part, by agreeing to disagree on this issue. The result is that the currentmechanisms will work with 7-bit transport, but will move gracefully into an 8-bit worldshould 8-bit transport become commonplace in accordance with the mechanisms
currently being drafted by the SMTP extensions working group. However, both groups
are essentially united in rejecting an alternative approach that has been advocated in a
recent Internet Draft [11] that essentially declares SMTP to permit 8-bit data, with no
provision for negotiation among SMTP servers to ensure that 8-bit data is not sent willynilly
to 7-bit implementations.
"Preferred" encodings: There have been proposals for a statement that certain
encoding types are "preferred" for certain content-types. These have not yet been
adopted, largely because it seems likely that common sense will suffice to encourage
people to use, for example, base64 rather than quoted-printable when transmitting audio
data. There have also been proposals for a mechanism by which mail sent in the future
8-bit world could include a specification of a "preferred" encoding should the mail ever
need to be passed off to a 7-bit mailer, but this too can probably be done without.
Non-ASCII header data: Many, particularly those from non-English speaking
countries, feel strongly that they should be able to use their own character sets in the
RFC 822 header area, particularly in human names and in the Subject specification.
However, doing so opens up signicant problems in terms of interoperability and
compatibility with older systems. A mechanism was finally agreed upon, and was
published as a separate document [12] that is generally used as a companion document
with MIME.
Character Set Specification: Character sets are a perennial source of controversy, and
the mail extensions discussion was no different. The working group settled on a
relatively small set of "legal" character sets, and hopes to avoid the proliferation of an
unnecessarily wide variety of character sets in international electronic mail. It is
expected, however, that several more character sets will inevitably be added to the base
set defined in MIME, as that set is fundamentally incomplete. (In particular, most of the
MIME designers sincerely hope that ISO 10646 will succeed in becoming the world’s
universal character set, and will be happy to see the future specification of the use of ISO
10646 in MIME, but were unwilling to pre-specify the details of that usage before ISO
10646 had itself been completely standardized.) There was also extended debate on the
proper way to specify the character set syntactically, and whether or not it should be
possible to specify, probably nonsensically, that an audio message, for example, uses a
- 12 -
specific character set.
Implementations and Interoperation
Various parties in the Internet mail community have been moving quickly to implement
the new standards. A publicly-available implementation by the author adds full MIME
support to over a dozen of the most common UNIX and DOS mail readers, including
Berkeley Mail, MH, XMH, Elm, Emacs rmail, and Andrew. This implementation
supports both encoding mechanisms, the multipart, image, message, audio, text, and
text/richtext content-types, and is easily configurable to handle more. At least three other
"freeware" versions are already available, and the author is aware of approximately three
dozen other implementations, most of them commercial, that were announced or under
development as of the writing of this paper. A large number of prominent vendors of
email software, in particular, have announced their intention to support MIME.
Summary and Future Prospects
The Internet RFC 822 extensions are the combined effort of a great many people who
share the goal of making multipart, multi-character set, multimedia email widely
available on the Internet. They specify mechanisms for including and encoding a wide
variety of types and formats of information in mail, but remain flexible and open to
future extensions. In particular, they are inherently far more open, flexible, and
extensible than solutions based on a single message format such as ODA [6].
Implementation experience so far suggests that the extensions are technically feasible
and relatively easy to implement.
Although MIME was designed for the severe constraints imposed by making multimedia
data interoperate in the bizarre world of electronic mail, the result is a general-purpose
format for representing almost any kind of data in a very robust manner. The growing
acceptance of MIME increases the likelihood that software to interpret MIME-format
data will be available on a wide variety of platforms, thus increasing the appeal of the
format for non-mail applications. There is no reason why MIME could not be used for
such non-mail applications as electronic publishing, multimedia database servers, and so
on. Indeed, interest in using MIME for such purposes has been wide and growing since
the publication of RFC 1341, the official MIME definition.
It remains to be seen, of course, whether MIME will ultimately succeed to make
multimedia mail ubiquitous. But if multimedia mail between software and hardware of
multiple vendors begins to interoperate regularly and reliably for a significant user
community, it is hard to see what benefit any mail software vendors or service providers
will find in bucking the trend.
Acknowledgements
The Internet mail extensions are the product of an Internet Extensions Task Force
Working Group. Far too many people participated in that effort to acknowledge all by
name. I particularly want to thank Ned Freed and Greg Vaudreuil for their tireless efforts
- 13 -
to bring this work to fruition, and Bob Kraut, Al Buzzard, and Stu Personick, my
การแปล กรุณารอสักครู่..
