At 10:18 AM 10/26/94, Rick Troth wrote:
When is it appropriate to use Binary on US-ASCII text?
When it contains very long lines.
Please don't, Steve. Please PLEASE don't do that.
That's one of the things CTE: binary is for, Rick. It's certainly not
something I recommend that users do, but I really don't see how I can avoid
offering it as an option.
RTF files are a good example; inserting my own linebreaks in an RTF file is
a disaster, unless it's done in an RTF-savvy way. However, interpreting
RTF is not something I want to do. And so if I insert linebreaks, the user
is screwed. The next option is to use quoted-printable. However, some
recipients can't deal with THAT. And so the final option is to turn off
word wrap, turn off quoted-printable, and trust to luck that the long lines
will make it. Sometimes they don't, but sometimes they do.
Does this leave a smile on my face? No. I'd much rather users allow me to
do QP or word wrap. But if they can in fact get their data through if and
only if I send very long lines of ascii text, then I cannot justify
refusing to let them do it. I tell them it's a bad idea, but that's as far
as I go. They're my customers, not my children (however much they
sometimes resemble the latter :-)).
--
Steve Dorner, Qualcomm Incorporated. "Oog make mission statement."