Date: Wed, 12 Feb 1997 20:50:59 -0800 From: jehamby@lightside.com (Jake Hamby) To: jb@cimlogic.com.au, terry@lambert.org Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: MIME applications for FreeBSD Message-ID: <199702130450.UAA01601@lightside.com>
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Terry Lambert writes: > As to what binary data is permitted to be encoded: > > 1) Any binary data the sender and the recipient can agree upon > > > Though I'd be perfectly happy to see this limited to binary data for > which public source reference implementations exist (ie: no more Word > documents unless Microsoft publically documents Word file format, no > PDF documents unless Adobe documents their "encryption" preventing > the use of non-Adobe readers, but not preventing any Adobe reader from > decoding the document, etc., etc.). Absolutely! Although figuring out the lowest common denomintor for, e.g. rich text, often leads to all sorts of oddities. For example, I just received a price quote for a Micron PC by E-Mail, in of all things, UUENCODED RTF format! As I happily uudecoded it, and imported it into WordPerfect 6.0 for UNIX on my SPARCstation, I couldn't help but wonder about the poor PC lusers running Eudora, etc., and trying to figure THAT out. Hmm, now that I think of it, Netscape does automagically decode UUencoded pictures from USENET (hmm, wonder what Netscape programmer was reading alt.binaries.pictures.erotica when he thought of adding that feature ;), maybe it does the same thing for E-Mail? Oh well.. Another comment on this dangerously off-topic thread: There is now commercial gateway software designed specifically to look at MIME attachments and convert them into a format friendly to the recipient. They even go so far as to add an appropriate resource fork if the recipient is a Mac user, or add the 3-character extension if the recipient is a PC user. Wonder what happens if the recipient's using UNIX? :) Anyway, I used to get really upset when PC/Mac users at work sent me MS Office documents as attachments, but now that WABI is fast enough for me, I just use that. Now that I have a decent version of WABI at home (Solaris/x86), it looks like that won't be a problem with my personal mailbox either, but of course, if somebody sent me a Word document in my private mailbox, I'd probably delete it as a matter of principle... :). -- Jake
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