At 3:14 PM 10/17/94, John Gardiner Myers wrote:
In practice, this is not the case. Few implementations of RFC 822 can
This is the critical point. Reality dictates what we must deal with, not
just specs.
My own reading of the relevant text in the Mime spec is that use of 8BIT is
to be the same as 7BIT, but with bits that have their 8th bit on also
allowed. Since the reality is that old-style email doesn't deal with null
very well, then one would expect 8BIT to do badly also.
Different statement: RFC822 says sending NULL is ok for 7BIT, but broad
(mis)practise says it isn't. Mime says 8BIT is like 7BIT, except for the
larger set of characters. Don't plan on NULL working.
Different statement: The Mime spec says that 8BIT isn't used yet. This
means that one would expect some additional documentation to be forthcoming
in order to thrash out the minute details of its use. One would hope that
this minor matter of NULL would be included in the (very brief) document.
d/
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