As Alain said, it USED to be the case that you could use either base64
or q-p for either binary or line-oriented data.
With the removal of the portable newlines, we made base64 into a
binary-only encoding.
Quoted-printable, however, CAN still, as currently defined, be used to
encode either binary or line-oriented data, but you have to be clear on
what you're encoding. If it is binary, then the q-p data stream should
contain only soft line breaks (i.e. linebreaks preceded by "="), and all
CR or LF characters should be encoded using the = notation.
What I'm not convinced of, however, is that this kind of encoding
(binary data encoded in q-p) is at all useful, nor that it is
fundamentally as robust as base64. But, with the current draft, I
believe that it is at least POSSIBLE. -- Nathaniel