Re: DIME Use Case?

Simon Fell <[email protected]> writes:
> On Sun, 14 Apr 2002 08:28:48 -0700, in soap you wrote:
> >It would be nearly as straightforward to define and implement an
> >analagous protocol with MIME replacing DIME. Again, what value is
> >DIME adding to the picture?
> Simplicity of implementation, performance.
I don't find the performance claim very convincing at all.
I'd be extremely surprised if the overhead of MIME parsing
was substantial in any real system.

> No one has defined a subset
> or profile of MIME which gets anywhere near the simplicity of DIME.
Perhaps, but it's certainly possible to do so. That said, I'm not sure
that simplicity is the only virtue. MIME is much more powerful and
flexible than DIME. In my experience, the approach of defining a
simple protocol that only services some immediate need often creates
massive headaches when it is subsequently discovered that there were
other requirements that were not incorporated into the original
design.

> In particular boundary management in MIME is a PIA, AIUI the boundary
> searching can be simplified by the use of a content-length header in
> the part, but then what's the MIME equivalent of chunking ?
So, you're saying that it's worth inventing an entirely new
packaging protocol to avoid writing the relatively trivial
amount of code required to handle MIME boundaries?

-Ekr

--
[Eric Rescorla                                   [email protected]]
                http://www.rtfm.com/