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?
As Lawrence has already stated, what you are effectively proposing here is a
misuse of quoted-printable. More generally, transport limitations and the
encodings used to work around them are _completely_ orthogonal to presentation
issues. Quoted-printable addresses such transport issues, but says nothing at
all about presentation. And since several implementations made this error (but
the vast majority did not) the MIME specification was changed some time back to
make it quite clear that these things really are orthogonal.
I continue to believe that format=flowed is the only proposal made thus far
that addresses the presentation issues adequately while maintaining the highest
degree of compatibility possible with the installed base. We've tried the
markup approach in the field and we've tested the separate subtype approach,
and neither of them works. And no amount of wishful thinking on our part (and
we've had a lot of it over the past few years) has sufficed to change this.
Ned