Re: Propsed new issue: variability of encoding in Miffy

Yes, q-p, 7bit and 8bit aren't really relevant; however, if the group 
disallows base64 in MIFFY, it won't be possible to use it in a 
non-binary-clean transport. There was talk of doing so; I agree that 
the most sensible thing is to just let it be (at least in MIFFY).


On Jan 7, 2004, at 9:30 AM, Amelia A Lewis wrote:

> I hate to break into the discussion, but I think that you guys may be 
> over-engineering.
>
> 7bit and 8bit are *text* encodings.  As such, they permit padding of 
> lines with whitespace, stripping whitespace, and conversion of line 
> terminators to NVT ASCII normal form (CRLF).  I do not believe that 
> you can safely convert binary to either encoding and back again 
> without the possibility of lossage.  base64 was invented to permit 
> transport of a complete eight-bit octet over a seven-bit transport 
> (gatewaying to five-bit transports or similar crude tricks remains the 
> province of unstandardized gateway-specific algorithms).  In other 
> words, I think that this is out of scope.  Although it's possible that 
> I've converted common practice into a requirement.  I do believe 
> someone should swot up the specifics before going further, 'cause I 
> think it's irrelevant to transport of binary materials.