Well, I'm a little leery about this one, primarily because I've yet to
see any evidence of 8-bit enclaves (presumably in Europe) converting
from "8bit" to some other content-transfer-encoding when mail leaves
their enclave. (I realize that MIME is less than a year old, and it may
well start happening soon.) Until such gateways are built, I fear that
quoted-binary will only make matters worse, by encouraging mail to be
sent around in a form that is even less meaningful when it
"unexpectedly" leaves the enclave.
Well, I was actually thinking about Usenet news here. Since work has
been started on a revision of RFC 1036 (although not in any official
working group or such), there will shortly (say, within a year or so)
be some official permission to send 8-bit data in news in some cases
(lots of people are doing it already, even untagged, which is the first
thing to fix).
What you say about 8bit conversion is true, although things are
improving here. The next version of nn will refuse to send 8-bit
characters unless properly tagged with "8bit" and "charset" (it will
in fact add these headers for you if you have specified an 8-bit character
set for your terminal). A future version could encode them in
quoted-printable, giving people some incentive to upgrade...
But consider this: If you have control of an enclave, you can make sure
that data with a transfer-encoding of "quoted-binary" never leaves it,
right? So you can define your own local c-t-e ("x-quoted-binary"?) and
make sure your gateway never lets such data out. One might even claim
that in such a case standardization is unnecessary, but I wouldn't go
that far. What I would suggest is that if someone gets this working in
a gateway, then an RFC documenting and standardizing the "quoted-binary"
usage would be a trivial amount of followup effort. I'd just like to
see at least one gateway come first! -- NB
I concur with this, although what you are essentially saying is that
everyone can invent his *own* x-quoted-printable until a standard one
arrives. It seems wise to have some hope for the future: we should
design for 8-bit environments with backwards compatibility hacks for
7-bit folks. Better add one more standard content-encoding *NOW* then
within 5 years, when it will seriously hamper interoperability.
--
Luc Rooijakkers Internet:
lwj(_at_)cs(_dot_)kun(_dot_)nl
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science UUCP: uunet!cs.kun.nl!lwj
University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands tel. +3180652271