Direct Internet Message Encapsulation

Direct Internet Message Encapsulation (DIME) was a Microsoft-proposed internet standard in the early 2000s for the streaming of binary and other encapsulated data over the Internet.

According to the IETF web site, the standard has been withdrawn and never made RFC status. However, Microsoft did at one time recommend DIME for transmitting files via Web services. It was also used in Java EE, but differences in the implementation of the protocol made it difficult

The first version was submitted to the IETF in November 2001; the last update was submitted in June 2002. By December 2003, DIME had lost out, in competition with Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism and SOAP with Attachments,. Microsoft now describes DIME as "superseded by the SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM) specification"

The standard was supposed to be an improved version of MIME (see ). In particular, the difficulty with MIME is that each message must be encoded as text, and that its sections are separated by a well-known separator given in the message header. This means, unfortunately, that the entire stream of data must be known to the sender before starting the communication, so as to choose a separator that does not occur in the data. This is not useful if the entire stream is not available when the communication is initiated, or when searching it even with a randomly-generated attempt at a unique separator (e.g. a GUID) is expensive. DIME was more oriented to streaming, allowing for example a receiver to process chunks of the message as they arrived, without having to wait for the entire message to arrive.