I think that the real issue is getting a compression algorithm out there, any algorithm will do IMHO. Implementing two sets of switching logic to turn on the compression is not going to be a killer. In fact I think it is likely to be the best solution. Not supporting compression in the base web specs was the biggest mistake we made. We could have made 14K modems look like 28.8 modems if the early browsers had linked to gnuzip. The piece that is currently missing is the means of advertising the capabilities of the client. The biggest problem with messaging is that the 1% of users with ASCII based clients stop the rest of the email population using features like MIME, HTML, S/MIME etc. I can see that we might have problems if we were using a framework like RDF to address this issue and the mechanism did not account for the fact that clients might be able to do compressin in S/MIME but not in MIME (or vice versa). Perhaps the real solution to this problem is to approach it from another direction entirely. Rather than the RDF piecemeal description of supported features maybe we should define client profiles specifying feature sets that make sense. Then we could distribute client capability info with a single certificate attribute. Phill -----Original Message----- From: Jim Schaad [mailto:jimsch@xxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2000 1:57 AM To: pgut001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; ietf-smime@xxxxxxx Subject: RE: Comments on draft-ietf-smime-compression-00.txt My personal opinion is that we have given the MIME people a lot of time to work on this issue. They have not gotten anyplace that I am aware of so I think that we need to do it. If we end up with two ways of doing this then the S/MIME draft could always say what is to be used for that application. jim -----Original Message----- From: owner-ietf-smime@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-ietf-smime@xxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Peter Gutmann Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2000 3:15 PM To: ietf-smime@xxxxxxx Subject: Comments on draft-ietf-smime-compression-00.txt Does anyone have any further thoughts on compression as a CMS content type vs a MIME type? I think this was more or less beaten to death (and beyond :-) the last time it came up, but if anyone has any further thoughts please post them. (The password issues are being worked on offline, I'll post an update in a day or two). Peter.
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