Re: quoted-printable

> Excerpts from internet.ietf-822: 12-Feb-92 quoted-printable
> Walt Daniels(_at_)watson(_dot_)ibm(_dot_) (943)


> Quoted-printable seems like excess baggage.

Well, I think this is a GROSS overstatement.  Consider the case of mail
that has the following type:

Content-type:  text/plain; charaset=iso-8859-1.

Let's say it is in a European language such as German.  Now, the vast
majority of the characters in the message -- maybe even on the order of 99%,
though I don't really know that much about the frequency table of letter usage
in German -- will be characters without the high order bit turned on, i.e.
legitimate ASCII characters.  A few stray characters, however, will be things
with umlauts, and so on.

With quoted printable, this message can be sent in such a way that it is
essentially readable in its "raw" form, on any ASCII terminal.  If we encoded
it in base64, it becomes gobbledygook in the absence of decoding software.
This is the primary rationale (there are others) for the existence of
quoted-printable, and I think it's a darned good one....  -- Nathaniel