Your suggestion is actually a common misuse and misunderstanding of QP
encoding. Content-Transfer-Encoding is part of the transport system, not a
part of the data format. It is only there to compensate for SMTP's
limitations. It is entirely legal for mail servers to change the C-T-E for
parts of a message as they relay it (unless the message is
multipart/signed).
The reason that we are working on format=flowed is that there is no legal
type for describing text where a new line separates text flows from each
other. The current standard separates lines of text. The most proper
display of the current standard (text/plain) is not to wrap long lines, but
to display a horizontal scroll bar and display each newline separated run
on a separate line. In format=flowed the text between "hard" carriage
returns is specifically to be flowed (wrapped) to fit the display width. A
horizontal scroll bar should not be used.
Text/plain, format=flowed and text/paragraph all work with the charset
parameter the same. You can use UTF-8, UTF-7, iso-8859-* or other. They
only apply to the code points or characters and have nothing to do with the
formatting.
LL
At 10:40 PM -0800 10/25/98, Ashley Yakeley wrote:
What's the best way to send text with non-ASCII characters, given the
option of format=flowed? The obvious thing to do is to choose a charset,
and encode it in quoted-printable. But at that point I hardly need
format=flowed, since I can now safely transport lines of any length. Or
should I use UTF-7 instead?
--
Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA