ietf-822
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Re: Format=Flowed and Non-ASCII Characters

1998-10-26 14:29:35
At 1998-10-26 08:22, Steve Dorner wrote:

Adding "format=flowed" means that long lines are to be treated as
paragraphs (eg, by wrapping them to the display width).

Right. My mistake.

My question more concerned the use of format=flowed over quoted-printable 
given the proposal's emphasis on readability by the many non MIME-aware 
or MIME-compliant MUAs currently in use. Having just perused the archive 
it turns out it was partly answered by an earlier message:

At 1998-09-01 12:02, Randall Gellens wrote:

...
Or even

While Quoted-Printable encoding MUST be used when necessary to encode
non-US-ASCII characters, it SHOULD NOT be used unless required for such
uses; that is, if the SMTP server supports 8BITMIME, or the message
only contains US-ASCII characters, there is no need for
Quoted-Printable encoding.

The intent of Format=Flowed is to allow user agents to generate flowed
text which is non-obnoxious when viewed as pure Text/Plain; use of
Quoted-Printable hinders this and may cause Format=Flowed to be
rejected by end users.

...but I'd like to point out that quoted-printable may not be necessary 
to encode non-US-ASCII, given UTF-7.

The question is, which is better for the existing (international) base of 
installed users as would be recipients: using qp (at the transport 
level), or using UTF-7 (at the content-type level)?


-- 
Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA