On Mon, 16 Feb 1998, ruth moulton
<ruth(_at_)muswell(_dot_)demon(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk> writes
While I was reading this I DID think that the same affect could be
achieved with quoted printable. Surely a decoded QP line can be folded
by the receiving MUA, where there is a hard cr/lf then the line should
be broken.
Not sure what you mean here, but quoting you out of order...
Am I wrong in thinking that one advantage of text/paragraph over
text/plain plus QP encoding, is that to non MIME MUAs the result is
better looking. After all for a MIME inteligent MUA it is just as
capable of handling the latter as the former,
... text/plain plus QP encoding is precisely what all the fuss is about!
Messages sent text/plain are meant to have their line-breaks just where
the sender wants them - so if some MUA sends out a line of 900
characters before a hard line-break (maybe using qp because it
mistakenly thinks qp supports paragraphs), the receiving MIME-compliant
MUA should display a line of 900 characters! This is invariably _not_
what the user themselves had in mind.
I thought one of the advantages of QP with soft & hard line breaks
is that it is proof against adding/stripping of trailing white space.
QP is indeed proof against adding/stripping of trailing white space.
QP encoded text MAY be sent to non MIME recipients and still be
legible, the only problem being the existance of '=' and =20' at the
end of most lines. I would not say the message 'would never be
suitable' to send to non mime recipients.
It may be (largely) legible, but if you used non-MIME software you would
probably agree that it is unsuitable. MIME has got a very bad name over
large sections of UseNet solely because QP has leaked out into the non-
MIME world.
Am I wrong in thinking that one advantage of text/paragraph over
text/plain plus QP encoding, is that to non MIME MUAs the result is
better looking. After all for a MIME inteligent MUA it is just as
capable of handling the latter as the former,
also with text/paragraph the MUA is given *explicit* permission to
fold long lines and use proportianl fonts.
The advantage of my version of text/paragraph over the version defined
in <draft-newman-mime-textpara-00.txt> is that it behaves better when
read by non-MIME MUAs or when read by MIME MUAs that do not support
text/paragraph. Another advantage is that it _specifies_ which lines
should be wrapped and which lines shouldn't.
--
Ian Bell T U R N P I K E Ltd