D. J. Bernstein <djb(_at_)cr(_dot_)yp(_dot_)to> schrieb/wrote:
I'm not saying that Quoted-Printable had no short-term benefits for its
short-term costs. I'm saying that, viewed from our long-term perspective
eleven years later, the failure to require 8-bit transparency was an
amazingly stupid decision.
From our present perspective, that's true. Back then, it might
have been the best solution.
Further, remember that the first MIME standards date back to 1992.
Back then, Unicode was brand-new and UTF-8 only came with the 2.0
version in 1996. Without UTF-8, you just could not even think
about using Unicode in message headers; and without Unicode, you
could not solve the charset-labelling problem. This might not seem
to be a problem in the Western world, which only uses ISO-8859-1
(with some exceptions) but it certainly was in Middle and East
Europe, the Arabic world, the Far East etc. "Just send 8bit" does
not work there because you don't know the charset.
Probably the result would have been long-term 8-bit with no
short-term kludges. Conceivably it would have been long-term 8-
bit plus optional short-term Quoted-Printable. Either way, it
would have been vastly better than what actually happened.
The "short-term kludges" are already going away. The body of
messages is now often sent in 8bit instead of qp. Some mailers
will still convert it down to quoted-printable but that does not
matter either because mailers will still have to support the
"short-term kludges" to handle old mail and mail sent by/through
systems that still need them.
But we still need the charset parameter. The movement towards UTF-
8 everywhere is quite new.
Actually, one could now write a specification that declares the
headers to be UTF-8 or an unkown leagacy 8bit charset.
Claus
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