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
--
Pete Resnick <mailto:presnick(_at_)qualcomm(_dot_)com>
QUALCOMM Incorporated - Direct phone: (858)651-4478, Fax: (858)651-1102