Nathaniel Borenstein writes:
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...
If we encoded it in quoted-printable, it becomes gobbledygook in the
absence of decoding software. This is the primary rationale (there
are others) for the existence of mnemonic, and I think it's a darned
good one... :-)
Seriously, I doubt that quoted-printable will catch on for such things
as German text. Maybe for Makefiles, but not for German text.
If we just took the small step of defining the mnemonics of *only* the
Latin-1 set, we would satisfy quite a great need. I feel that it is
much more likely to reach closure on something like this than the
humungous set being proposed by Keld, for which we have no clear "OK"
signals from the myriad user communities directly affected by such a
proposal.
I have been told that ISO 8859-7 (i.e. 8-bit) is just fine in Greece.
Stay tuned for the next version of the multilingual encoding draft,
which will take into account some of the realities that we have bumped
into lately.
Regards,
Erik