(all mail systems will handle ascii text).
This statement is very misleading and not correct. see below.
MIME - Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extensions.
Below is a definition for it from the IETF. Please none KEY point. mime doesn't use ASCII. ASCII is a US thing only and even in the US there are computers that use EBCIDIC and Unicode character sets. Because of this 8 bit bytes cannot me sent as data over the internet so a binhex 6-4 encoding scheme is used to encode the data. The spec can easily by found at the IETF web pages and the links below:
Definition: MIME (Multi-Purpose Internet Mail Extensions)
MIME (Multi-Purpose Internet Mail Extensions) is an extension of the original Internet e-mail protocol that lets people use the protocol to exchange different kinds of data files on the Internet: audio, video, images, application programs, and other kinds, as well as the ASCII handled in the original protocol, the Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP). In 1991, Nathan Borenstein of Bellcore proposed to the Internet Engineering Task Force that SMTP be extended so that Internet (but mainly Web) clients and servers could recognize and handle other kinds of data than ASCII text. As a result, new file types were added to "mail" as a supported Internet Protocol file type.
Servers insert the MIME header at the beginning of any Web transmission. Clients use this header to select an appropriate "player" application for the type of data the header indicates. Some of these players are built into the Web client or browser (for example, all browsers come with GIF and JPEG image players as well as the ability to handle HTML files); other players may need to be downloaded.
MIME is specified in detail in Internet RFCs 1522 and 1523, which amend the original mail protocol specification, RFC 821 (the Simple Mail Transport Protocol) and the ASCII messaging header, RFC 822.
Selected Links
Here is the text for RFC 821, RFC 822, RFC 1522, and RFC 1523.
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Sean |
