On Mon, 24 Oct 1994, Steve Dorner wrote:
At 1:19 PM 10/24/94, Michael D'Errico wrote:
certain versions of Eudora refused to generate ANY lines longer than 76
characters?
There has never been such a version of Eudora. If you got that impression,
it's from someone who doesn't understand how to use it.
I guess I don't know how to use it then :) It's been a while, but it would
cut lines at 76 characters regardless of the word-wrap setting. In the
current version here it has been fixed. I was speculating that the 76
character limit for base-64 and q-p might have been interpreted as the
meaning of "short" lines.
My whole point in this is I want to see the defaults be for arbitrary binary
material, without having to slap a "Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary" on
every part of every message.
I suppose there really are two issues here. One is what to do with CTE:
7bit/8bit; there I think it clear that we should make the definitions be
the safest ones; 1-127/1-255, and short lines. The second is what a
missing CTE: means; currently we assume 7bit; perhaps it's reasonable to
assume binary instead. Or perhaps at some future date it will be
reasonable to change the default to binary (7bit being subset of binary, we
could do that, eh?).
If binary was the default, I would probably have never brought this up since
it would be more clear that 7bit and 8bit should be the special cases. There
is a problem just flipping the default though, since UA's that think 7bit is
the default will not realize that the contents could be binary.
This is precisely why I think 7bit/8bit/binary are bad -- they are being
used for two purposes that are logically separate. All three mean that
no encoding has been done. Isn't "none" a better choice for this? There
is absolutely no way to misinterpret it.
I for one *like* the idea of more explicit labelling (I've long wished for
an explicit parameter for newline conversion), but I don't hear much
support for it.
You have my vote.
Mike