Network Working Group N. Freed
Request for Comments: 4289 Sun Microsystems
BCP: 13 J. Klensin
Obsoletes: 2048 December 2005
Category: Best Current Practice
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part Four:
Registration Procedures
Status of This Memo
This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the
Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
improvements. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2005).
Abstract
This document specifies IANA registration procedures for MIME
external body access types and content-transfer-encodings.
Freed & Klensin Best Current Practice [Page 1]
RFC 4289 MIME Registration December 2005
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ....................................................2
2. External Body Access Types ......................................3
2.1. Registration Requirements ..................................3
2.1.1. Naming Requirements ...................................3
2.1.2. Mechanism Specification Requirements ..................3
2.1.3. Publication Requirements ..............................4
2.1.4. Security Requirements .................................4
2.2. Registration Procedure .....................................4
2.2.1. Present the Access Type to the Community ..............4
2.2.2. Access Type Reviewer ..................................4
2.2.3. IANA Registration .....................................5
2.3. Location of Registered Access Type List ....................5
2.4. IANA Procedures for Registering Access Types ...............5
3. Transfer Encodings ..............................................5
3.1. Transfer Encoding Requirements .............................6
3.1.1. Naming Requirements ...................................6
3.1.2. Algorithm Specification Requirements ..................6
3.1.3. Input Domain Requirements .............................6
3.1.4. Output Range Requirements .............................6
3.1.5. Data Integrity and Generality Requirements ............7
3.1.6. New Functionality Requirements ........................7
3.1.7. Security Requirements .................................7
3.2. Transfer Encoding Definition Procedure .....................7
3.3. IANA Procedures for Transfer Encoding Registration .........8
3.4. Location of Registered Transfer Encodings List .............8
4. Security Considerations .........................................8
5. IANA Considerations .............................................8
6. Acknowledgements ................................................8
7. References ......................................................9
A. Changes Since RFC 2048 .........................................9
1. Introduction
Recent Internet protocols have been carefully designed to be easily
extensible in certain areas. In particular, MIME [RFC2045] is an
open-ended framework and can accommodate additional object types,
charsets, and access methods without any changes to the basic
protocol. A registration process is needed, however, to ensure that
the set of such values is developed in an orderly, well-specified,
and public manner.
This document defines registration procedures that use the Internet
Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) as a central registry for these
values.
Freed & Klensin Best Current Practice [Page 2]
RFC 4289 MIME Registration December 2005
Note:
Registration of media types and charsets for use in MIME are
specified in separate documents [RFC4288] [RFC2978] and are not
addressed here.
1.1. Conventions Used in This Document
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].
2. External Body Access Types
[RFC2046] defines the message/external-body media type, whereby a
MIME entity can act as pointer to the actual body data in lieu of
including the data directly in the entity body. Each
datatracker.ietf.org