I have sent you (in private mail) a copy of the explanation by Mark Crispin,
who, being a native english speaker and a real expert, did better than I
can do at explaining this. /AF
Thanks. I re-read Mark's explanation (which I agree is good), and I
now see your point more clearly. (Sorry!) It seems to me that MIME
really only needs some clarification. I'm not sure where changes would
be necessary, but at least one of those places might be:
Rule #4 (Line Breaks): A line break, whatever its
representation is following the local newline
convention, must be represented by a (RFC 822) line
break, which is a CRLF sequence, in the Quoted-
Printable encoding. If isolated CRs and LFs, or LF CR
and CR LF sequences are allowed to appear in binary
data according to local conventions, they must be
represented using the "=0D", "=0A", "=0A=0D" and
"=0D=0A" notations respectively.
The above paragraph could be made clearer by indicating that "text"
must be converted to the Internet CRLF format before applying the
quoted-printable encoding, and that other, non-text objects should not
be converted to CRLF format before q-p'ing.
Nathaniel's objection that UNIX's sendmail expects text in the local
newline format is resolved by your comment (in the 2nd diagram) that
the output of the quoted-printable encoder should be in local newline
format. This is just a repeat of what others have said about "adding
another level" of encoding. Are we going around in circles again?
Again, I'm sorry.
Guys, let's clarify.
Regards,
Erik