Internet Draft MIME Conformance

(IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months. Internet-Drafts may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is not appropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as a "working draft" or "work in progress". To learn the current status of any Internet-Draft, please check the 1id-abstracts.txt listing contained in the Internet-Drafts Shadow Directories on ds.internic.net (US East Coast), nic.nordu.net (Europe), ftp.isi.edu (US West Coast), or munnari.oz.au (Pacific Rim). 1. Abstract STD 11, RFC 822, defines a message representation protocol specifying considerable detail about US-ASCII message headers, and leaves the message content, or message body, as flat US-ASCII text. This set of documents, collectively called the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, or MIME, redefines the format of messages to allow for Internet Draft MIME Conformance April 1995 (1) textual message bodies in character sets other than US-ASCII, (2) non-textual message bodies, (3) multi-part message bodies, and (4) textual header information in character sets other than US-ASCII. These documents are based on earlier work documented in RFC 934, STD 11, and RFC 1049, but extends and revises them. Because RFC 822 said so little about message bodies, these documents are largely orthogonal to (rather than a revision of) RFC 822. In particular, these documents are designed to provide facilities to include multiple parts in a single message, to represent body and header text in character sets other than US-ASCII, to represent formatted multi-font text messages, to represent non-textual material such as images and audio fragments, and generally to facilitate later extensions defining new types of Internet mail for use by cooperating mail agents. The initial document in this set, RFC MIME-IMB, specifies the various headers used to describe the structure of MIME messages. The second document defines the general structure of the MIME media typing system and defines an initial set of media types. The third document, RFC MIME-HEADERS, describes extensions to RFC 822 to allow non-US-ASCII text data in Internet mail header fields. The fourth document, RFC MIME-REG, specifies various IANA registration procedures for MIME-related entities. This fifth and final document describes MIME conformance criteria as well as providing some illustrative examples of MIME message formats, acknowledgements, and the bibliography. The first and second documents in this set defined MIME …