ietf-822
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Re: MTAs and Content-Transfer-Encoding conversions

1993-08-19 17:30:41
To:  Steve Dorner <sdorner(_at_)qualcomm(_dot_)com>, 
ietf-822(_at_)dimacs(_dot_)rutgers(_dot_)edu
Subject:  Re: MTAs and Content-Transfer-Encoding conversions 
Date:  Thu, 19 Aug 1993 16:01:13 -0700 (PDT)

Mark Crispin writes...

I think that the reason for the objections to quoted-printable is that it
tries to do too much.

Specifically, q-p tries to deal with the data munging problem as well as 
the 8-bit problem.

just trying to make sure I understand...

+ by "data munging problem", I assume you mean 
  "munging of certain characters and/or long lines" ?
  (or "munging of characters that don't matter visually")

+ by "8-bit problem", I assume you mean "munging of the 0x80 bit"?
  (or "munging of non-ASCII graphic characters")

...and your claim is that by trying to solve both problems at once,
rather than just the latter, q-p loses too much in readability?

My proposal is for something like this:

      Content-Transfer-Encoding 8IN7

...the point of which is to make a more readable encoding that doesn't need
to be able to preserve every bit through transport?

And finally, do you think it's worth the pain to introduce another c-t-e at
this late date?

----

suggestion:

Rather than introduce a new encoding, why not promote a "profile" for
quoted-printable for "ordianry text" that isn't quite as annoying to read on
non-MIME-UAs? It would still use three-character-hex-codes like =C1 (instead
of ~A) for graphic characters above 0x7f. But if it's not important to
preserve trailing spaces and tabs, why not have the sender's UA simply
delete the trailing spaces and expand the tabs before encoding?

Keith