Re: FW: Digest mess
Joel N. Weber II (devnull@gnu.org)
Mon, 5 Jan 1998 16:41:34 GMT
Right now I suspect that most
servers contain routines for decoding base64, but not encoding and most
clients have routines for encoding and not decoding.
If clients support data: urls, they have to be able to decode base64.
The implentation of base64 is fairly simple; I've seen a 24 line
implmentation of the decoder in the `awk' language.
If we imagine a day when Basic no longer exists there will be no
need for base64 in server or client.
I doubt base64 will ever stop existing. It will probably always be
present for backwards compatibility. Servers could stop supporting it
(most web servers I use already don't use it, since the info on them is
publicly accessible), but a client might as well keep code that supports
it, in case a user ever needs it.