Propsed new issue: variability of encoding in Miffy

This is in fulfillment of an action item that I took on today's call to
request openning of an action item.

I had always assumed that in Miffy, all the parts except the root would be
octet streams, probably labeled as application/octet-stream and sent in
8-bit format.  Anish mentioned on the call today his assumption that a
range of representations would be allowed on the wire, providing that
content-transfer-encoding would be correctly set to indicate the
representation used.

The tradeoffs appear to be:  a) variability is more flexible b) variability
requires that all receivers/interpreters be capable of decoding all
encodings if universal interop is to be achieved c) neither of us was sure
whether the decision to fix the representation might be taken as a misuse
of MIME.

The purpose of this note is to request that we open an issue to resolve
these questions.

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Noah Mendelsohn
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
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Received on Wednesday, 17 December 2003 13:40:03 UTC