RE: MIME as a vCalendar element separator - bad move...

[Frank Dawson <fdawson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Robert:

vCalendar is a clear-text encoding.

- - Frank

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From: 	Robert Moskowitz[SMTP:rgm3@chrysler.com]
Sent: 	Sunday, December 08, 1996 7:26 PM
To: 	Skip Montanaro; ietf-calendar@imc.org
Subject: 	Re: MIME as a vCalendar element separator - bad move...

At 03:26 PM 12/6/96 -0500, Skip Montanaro wrote:
>
>Now return to the actual problem at hand.  vCalendar is a compound document
>format.  It uses BEGIN/END blocks to separate the various subsections of
>each document.  Because it's self-contained, you can easily stuff it into
>lots of different kinds of envelopes without disturbing it.  You can throw a
>MIME wrapper around it and email it over the Internet.  You can also wrap it
>in little infrared photons and send it over an IrDA link.

Check out:

1767  "MIME Encapsulation of EDI Objects"

For another example of a well defined format carried within a MIME envelope.

>Lets consider another example.  Suppose we formed an IETF working group to
>work on the difficult problem of exchanging CAD information.  Up steps
>AutoCAD and says, "Hey gang! We have this super object format called DXF
>that will do everything you need already.  Just define a new MIME type to
>encapsulate it and you're done."  Are you going to go tear apart DXF and
>replace its existing grouping with MIME?  You could I suppose, but it would
>probably be a very poor move.

Nah, actually we are working with AutoSTEP and ENGDATA.  Might see
something soonish in this department...

>It's important to realize where the envelope ends and the letter begins.
>It's a bit tempting to try and use MIME as a general-purpose separator for
>compound document formats that happen to be easily readable because they
>only use printable ASCII (or ISO) characters.  Most of us would never dream
>of chopping up binary formats like GIF or DXF using MIME.  Why should we
>chop up vCalendar into MIME-separated pieces because we can view vCalendars
>with a text editor?

But in both of my real life cases, the data is binary.  Is vcalendar also
binary?


Robert Moskowitz
Chrysler Corporation
(810) 758-8212