At 7:52 PM 1/4/95, Masataka Ohta wrote:
The point is that people, reportedly, do NOT accept automatic
QP downgrading of MIME and, instead, downgrade the original
text by themselves only to use 7bit.
That is, QP is a failure.
The same thing can you say about other ways of encoding 8-bit characters.
Maybe some people like MNEMONICS more than QP, maybe some people
like QP more than MNEMONICS. Maybe some people like some other
encoding more than anything else.
Personally I like QP more than for example MNEMONICS, but this was not
what the discussion was about.
Though I can't evaluate how serious the failure is, it is not
surprising to me if people in a small(?) community continues to
just-send-8bit forever.
This might be true, but note that you did write "small". As the
communication between non-computer-skilled people tend to rise,
the force onto us programmers to develop systems that can pass
email with any character set will rise, and we just have to
implement some systems that both can handle anything, and
is interoperable with everything else. I know that you one again
will talk about ISO-2022 constructions, and that might be
one way of going BUT (please read this BUT, Masataka) you must
label the character set. If you don't you will NOT be able
to send you message to any other messaging system, and think
that the message you did send is readable.
So, we have two very, very important rules that we MUST follow:
1) You must be able to send information in a way that the
receiver can reconstruct the original message.
2) Any user on the Internet must be able to reconstruct
the message, both in the way of transfer encoding AND
content format.
When 8th bit truncated messages are merely just equally unreadable
as QP-downgraded messages, why not try to send as is without
downgrading?
This is completely wrong. The message itself WHILE ENCODED is unreadable,
yes, but the message is ot destroyed. As long as you have a given
character set which include 8-bit bytes, there is NO WAY of sending
the message without destroying it, if you don't encode it in
some way. Today QP is choosen in sweden, MNEMONICS in denmark, but the
way of doing this is not important, it is the fact that we are
using SOME transport encoding mechanism.
In sweden I can see the last year that the rules when buying
email software have changed from "give me a cc-mail system" to
"give me a system that runs on all computers and sends messages
to all over the world without destroying the message". Note that
in the last sentence not even MIME is mentioned, but MIME is
choosen because MIME gives the tools you need to both label the
message with what transfer encoding that is chosen, and what the
message itself is (what character set for example).
Once again, the important thing here is that people first of all
do NOT accept removal of the 8th bit AND they don't give a damn (sorry)
about what the message looks like when it is transferred.
What are you talking about? In Kelds environment they did choose
MNEMONICS together with MIME instead of using QP to be able to
more easy handle the process when migrating from 822-only mail
to MIME. That a group of people did choose MNEMONICS does NOT
imply that they did not choose MIME.
What are you talking about? What MIME capability, do you think,
MNEMONICS needs?
None, but I know what the people in denmark is doing, and they DO
use MIME as the functionality needed to lable the message with the
information about the MNEMONICS translation. Do you think all messages
in denmark is in MNEMONICS?
Please read what I did write. I didn't write anything about MIME
in the sentence about the MNEMONIC stuff.
So, as QP is not preffered, MIME, which should have been related,
is made unrelated, which I call failure.
It is not! You MUST have a method of labelling the message with
the information that it is in MNEMONICS format, and they have
chosen MIME. One thing gives the other.
What I was arguing about was that noone in daily life should
just-send-8 without first using some ESMTP extension.
In 821-ext context, you are right.
But, in 822-ext context where your choice is between just-send-8bit
and QP-downgrade, the answer in the real world seems to be
different.
Maybe in your world, not mine. Note that you have more choices. You CAN
choose something else than QP.
paf