Re: Content-Transfer-Encoding

Roy Fielding (fielding@beach.w3.org)
Thu, 27 Jul 1995 23:53:36 -0400 

>The Base64 alphabet was chosen because it is a compact printable 
>representation of base 64 numbers that is portable between ASCII, EBCDIC, 
>ISO 646, and ISO 10646 that should have multiple correct alphabet 
>translation tables already available.

No, if we are going to go with something simple(-minded), then a
straight CRLF delimited number is more appropriate -- dicking with
bits and base64 is a waste of time if all you'd every save is
one or two bytes.

Right-o then, here's where the perceived consensus lands us.

Content-Transfer-Encoding: chunked

BNF:

   Entity-Body = *( chunk ) 
                 "0" CRLF
                 footer
                 CRLF
 
   chunk       = chunk-size CRLF chunk-data CRLF
 
   chunk-size  = hex-no-zero *hex
 
   chunk-data  = chunk-size(OCTET)
 
   footer      = *( Entity-Header )

   hex         = "0" | hex-no-zero
   hex-no-zero = "1"|"2"|"3"|"4"|"5"|"6"|"7"|"8"|"9"
               | "A"|"B"|"C"|"D"|"E"|"F"
               | "a"|"b"|"c"|"d"|"e"|"f"


 ....Roy T. Fielding  Department of ICS, University of California, Irvine USA
                      Visiting Scholar, MIT/LCS + World-Wide Web Consortium
                      (fielding@w3.org)                (fielding@ics.uci.edu)