RFC 1741 (rfc1741) - Page 2 of 6
MIME Content Type for BinHex Encoded Files
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 1741 Content Type for BinHex Files December 1994 AppleDouble file format [APPL90], encoded in MIME as multipart/appledouble [FALT94] and application/applefile [FALT94] is the preferred format for a Macintosh file that is to be included in an Internet mail message, because it provides recipients with Macintosh computers the entire document, including Icons and other Macintosh specific information, while other users easily can extract the Data fork (the actual data). However, this specification provides for use of the currently popular BinHex4.0 encoding schemes, as a convinience to the installed base of users. 2. MIME format for BinHex4.0 MIME-base Apple information is specified by: MIME type-name: APPLICATION MIME subtype name: MAC-BINHEX40 Required parameters: none Optional parameters: NAME, which must be a "value" as defined in RFC-1521 [BORE93]. Encoding considerations: none Security considerations: See separate section in the document Published specification: Appendix A Rationale: Permits MIME-based transmission of data with Apple Macintosh file system specific information using a currently popular, though platform specific, format. 2a. Detail specific to MIME-based usage Macintosh documents do not always need to be sent in a special format. Those documents with well-known MIME types and non- existent or trivial resource forks can be sent as regular MIME body parts, without use of AppleSingle, AppleDouble or BinHex4.0. Documents which lack a data fork must be sent as AppleSingle according to RFC 1740 [FALT94]. Unless there are strong reasons not to, all other documents should be sent as AppleDouble according to RFC 1740 [FALT94]. This includes documents with non-trivial resource forks, and documents without corresponding well-known MIME types. It may be valuable in some cases to allow the user to choose one format over another, either because he disagrees with the implementor's definition of "trivial" resource forks, or for reasons of his own. Faltstrom, Crocker & Fair
