ietf-822
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Re: Format=flowed delsp=Yes and quoted-printable

2003-08-15 09:03:51

On 8/15/03 at 11:17 AM -0400, Ken Hirsch wrote:

This rather misses the whole point of the format, doesn't it? RFC2646 says you SHOULD NOT use quoted-printable.

2646 says that you should not use quoted-printable "unless absolutely necessary (for example, non-US-ASCII (8-bit) characters over a strictly 7-bit transport such as unextended SMTP)." If the messages you looked at had non US-ASCII characters in them, they needed the quoted-printable. The important thing is that you don't encode the trailing spaces.

Besides which, quoted-printable already has a mechanism for soft line breaks.

NO! Quoted-printable does *NOT* have a mechanism for soft line breaks in the sense of paragraph wrapping the way that format=flowed does. Quoted-printable has a mechanism for breaking up a long line of characters over multiple lines for transmission purposes. When you put it back together, what you get is a single long line that (for example) should be displayed with a horizontal scrollbar. It is a representation of a single line, not a wrapped paragraph.

As Arnt Gulbrandsen pointed out last year, don't MUAs for CJK already need to handle quoted-printable, multiple charsets, etc.?

ISO-2022-JP, for example, has no need for quoted-printable. Of course, a MIME MUA has to handle quoted-printable, but CJK can be sent without QP.

Does Format=flowed really add anything?

Yes. It adds paragraph wrapping, and more importantly quoted paragraph wrapping, while preserving backward compatibility. It is the quoted paragraph wrapping (i.e., putting ">" before each line in a quoted section.) that is the biggest feature.

pr
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Pete Resnick <mailto:presnick(_at_)qualcomm(_dot_)com>
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