ietf-822
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Re: quoted-printable

1992-02-12 16:07:11
I agree completely with Nathaniel on this, of course. Quoted-printable is
mostly a concession to existing UA infrastructure. There is a lot of this
in MIME, and it was a major goal of this design to support existing
facilities as well as possible.

One thing that Nathaniel did not mention is that this does not necessarily
apply only to 8 bit encoding issues. My primary usage of quoted-printable
has nothing to do with this. I have lots of systems that handle 8 bit
data just fine, but don't handle long lines. In fact, I have to contend with
line length restrictions of 255 characters, or even less. Sending
base64 to these systems is simply unacceptable -- I'd rather damage the
data by wrapping lines than do that. Quoted-printable gives me exactly
what I need to deal with these systems in a way that their dumb UAs can
deal with, and I can provide an external utility to remove the encoding.
This is not as nice as putting the decode in the UA, but that's simply
impossible sometimes, and the approach of providing an external utility
for use when its needed is often the only viable option.

                                Ned

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