DIME

Short for Direct Internet Message Encapsulation, DIME was an Internet standard proposed by Microsoft in the early 2000s that only lasted a few years. It was supposed to be a method web services could stream binary data as an attachment. Since its inception, the standard has withdrawn and never made RFC (Request for Comments) status, according to the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) website.

DIME versus MIME usage

The intention behind the DIME standard was to enhance MIME (multipurpose Internet mail extensions), which had shortcomings. One notable issue was that each message needed to be encoded as text, and its segments were delimited by a designated separator mentioned in the message header. This requirement meant the sender had to be aware of the entire data stream before resuming communication so they wouldn't select a separator that appears in the data. This requirement posed a limitation when the entire communications stream wasn't available or when searching for such a separator was resource-intensive.

In contrast, DIME is more geared towards streaming, allowing, for instance, a recipient to process message chunks as they arrive, eliminating the need to wait for the entire message.

Computer acronyms, E-mail terms, Internet terms, SOAP, Stream