We are considering removing the portions of UTF-7 (the proposed 7 bit
encoding format of ISO 10646/Unicode which I posted to these lists in
December) which duplicate the quoted printable content transfer encoding.
This would involve removing rules 3, 4, and 5 regarding white space, line
breaks, and soft line breaks. This will make UTF-7 slightly simpler, and
UTF-7 data could still be passed with 7BIT content transfer encoding if it
met the criteria, just as for ASCII data. If lines were too long or there
were other problems, then UTF-7 could be passed through the quoted
printable content transfer encoding.
Since mailers will likely already be set up to examine messages to
determine which encoding to use, it seems like less work for implementers
to use existing code to handle line length and whitespace issues.
Converting 10646 to UTF-7 then basically consists of making it
ASCII-compatible, and leaving the rest to the content transfer encoding
software. This comes at a higher processing cost, however, since the
message stream must be processed twice.
We would like to hear your opinion on this particular issue.
David Goldsmith and Mark Davis
----------------------------
David Goldsmith
david_goldsmith(_at_)taligent(_dot_)com
Taligent, Inc.
10201 N. DeAnza Blvd.
Cupertino, CA 95014-2233