Let me state, from the start, that the primary purpose of this message is
to find a reasonable way to shut down this discussion about newlines. I do
not think it is essential to the success of MIME and I think that continuation
of the discussion will only add more confusion and delay.
I also think that shutting the discussion down is reasonable...
As with many things, it all hinges on perspective:
I do not view Quoted Printable as particularly "format" oriented and I
view the entire CRLF discussion as an issue with formatting. MIME already
has two methods for carefully preserving format information (RichText and
Hex64) so there is no compelling need to have Quoted-Printable to anything
special.
I see Quoted Printable as being IDENTICAL to ASCII, except that it has
ADDITIONAL characters. That is, all of the ASCII characters (except the
few that are co-opted as escape chars, and the like) should/must be treated
the same as they always have been -- INCLUDING CR, LF, and CRLF -- but
there are some additional characters which can be represented in this
extended way. Hence, whatever current systems do with CR, LF, and CRLF,
in the ASCII context, they should continue to do with Quoted-Printable.
Adding some clarification text, applicable to text/plain, as well as quoted
-printable, which reminds people that an Internet "line" is defined as
CRLF and that MIME, as with 822, only discussion Internet-standard
representations, seems like a nice thing for the MIME spec to do, but only
as a convenience, not as a definition of anything new or different.
Dave