Solutions we tried for E-mail
We, the people working on E-mail introduction and standardization in
the academic community, have tried to solve the problems of character
sets in the E-mail world twice.
Replacing everything with X.400
One solution rested on X.400 as the technology that would solve
everything.
This failed because:
- The products did not exist
- The solutions were not present in the products
- The Internet mail world was growing too quicklu
The idea of replacing the world's mail systems is now considered void.
Introducing MIME
MIME was designed as a mechanism for, among other things, carrying
data in multiple character sets around in unmodified E-mail.
Its design constraints were:
- NO change should be required for ASCII-only mail
- NO single character set should be mandated
- Existing solutions that broke the old standard were NOT adopted
The results were:
- MIME could be deployed without an infrastructure change
- Nobody had control over who used MIME and who didn't
- Lots of people were annoyed at "cyberjunk" in messages
Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no
Last modified: Tue Nov 29 16:04:37 1994