The standard was intended to be an improved version of MIME. In particular a difficulty with MIME is that each message must be encoded as text and that its sections are separated by a separator given in the message header. This means 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 is expensive. DIME is more oriented to streaming, allowing, for example, a receiver to process chunks of the message as they arrive without having to wait for the entire message.