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Using Quoted-Printable (Re: Line Wrapping Question)

1996-02-08 09:25:14
Jamie,
you say:

In Netscape, there is a preference toggle between "Allow 8-bit" and
"MIME Compliant (Quoted-Printable)".  It defaults to 8-bit now, since
there was great resistence to the use of QP when we made that the
default in an earlier beta.  And this resistance was, in fact, from
the very community that QP was designed to help: those with non-7bit
languages.  Many of our European users told us that the chance of their
recipients having only a 7-bit path was far, far less likely than the
chance that their recipients were able to decode MIME messages.  Sad
but true...

I was in the middle of some of the heated exchanges on this in Norway,
a typical (?) 8-bit market.
The problem with the Netscape toggle was that it was the same for Mail
*and for News*, at a time when Netscape was just about the only
newsreader that handled Quoted-Printable. (or "quoted-unreadable", as
one rather vociferous opponent names it).
(There now exists a second, called "knews", and I believe some of the
newer Gnus versions do it too).

We had the same sort of flak when we started using Q-P in mail 2 years
ago, and for almost a year we hacked mailers into using theoretically illegal
"content-transfer-encoding: 8bit", but when we recently went back
to using Q-P in mail, we didn't get *any* objection; the market for
E-mail had accepted MIME.

I believe having separate toggles for defaulting Q-P in Email and in
News would be good for the users.

     Harald A
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