Subject: RE: Comments on draft-ietf-smime-compression-00.txt

From: Philip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2000 09:18:58 -0800

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:[email-masked]]
Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2000 1:57 AM
To: [email-masked]; [email-masked]
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: [email-masked]
[mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of Peter Gutmann
Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2000 3:15 PM
To: [email-masked]
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.