...this reminds me of an issue I wanted to raise while reading rfc/
draft...
On Friday 15 August 2003 17:17, Ken Hirsch wrote:
I just searched the net for instances of Format=Flowed; Delsp=Yes and
found quite a few (all from Apple Mail). Almost all ofr the messages
were CTE: quoted-printable.
This rather misses the whole point of the format, doesn't it?
RFC2646 says you SHOULD NOT use quoted-printable.
I don't understand this SHOULD NOT. Well, I understand why it's there
(it's explained in the document), but I immediately thought: "What
the...". Let me explain:
As I see it (and Pete has just reinforced my view on this by sharing
it), format=flowed's main feature is to define paragraphs (in unquoted,
but more importantly also in quoted text) and an algorithm for
preserving that information on replies.
However, that requires trailing whitespace to be preserved, since line-
coupling to paragraphs is lost if TWS is. In my experience, "preserve
TWS" evaluates to "apply QP". Now, that is not suggested (not to say
forbidden) for readability reasons with legacy (non-QP-aware) MUAs.
IMO, priority should be on preserving the information for "modern" MUAs,
not on enhancing readability for legacy MUAs[1].
Marc
[1] legacy here meaning pre-MIME, not pre-format=flowed.
--
I am Bush of USA. You will be pacified. Resistance is futile.
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