ietf-822
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: draft-gellens-format-03.txt

1999-03-12 10:53:45
It should also be mentioned what happens if a sender does space-stuffing
and the receiver doesn't know to undo space-stuffing - which would be
typical for all MUAs that exist today which don't understand
Format=Flowed.  Such text might best belong in the Failure Modes section
(which might be renamed "Interoperability Issues" perhaps).  I don't have
any text to recommend for this, though.

I am in any case curious as to why space was chosen for the stuffing
character. I would have expected `\`, which is more usual in such
situations, and would make it immediately apparent to a user using an
unmodified reader that some special convention was being used.

The answer is quite simple: You can see \, whereas space is invisible.

If we learned nothing else from quoted-printable, it is that people will
not deploy mechanisms that make their text look ugly. And \ definitely
qualifies.

                                Ned

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>