Re: Content-Transfer-Encoding issue

[Merciadri Luca]

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Byung-Hee HWANG <bh@izb.knu.ac.kr> writes:

[...]
> Any comment advice welcome!
>
> TIA,
According to http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/gaidhlig/sracan/QP-8bit.txt,
both things are okay. Here is the most important text from this:

Both proposals had their merits.  Obviously the ESMTP solution was
best in the long run.  It was simpler and it saved some bandwidth,
CPU time and storage space which would otherwise be used in 7-bit
encoding of 8-bit data.  There are far fewer different MTA's around
than there are MUA's.  Only one piece of software had to be changed
on each machine and this was usually in the control of someone who
was knowledgeable about computers.  The ESMTP solution was easier to
interface to old pre-MIME software which was known to be 8-bit clean,
as most of it was.

The quoted-printable (QP) proposal also had its merits.  This solution
was close to the two people who most wanted a solution, the sender and
the recipient, rather than involving system managers of intervening
machines who might have no interest in the problem of accented
characters.  There was less danger of software being passed 8-bit
data.  (Examples were found of software which actually crashed if it
was presented with 8-bit data, although it would be amazing if there
was any such software left seven years on.)  Many people felt that even
if the recipient's mailer wasn't MIME capable it was better for him or
her to see thingies like "=E1" than to risk having accented characters
deleted or having their eighth bit stripped.

So BOTH proposals were accepted.  It is legal MIME to have messages
headed with:

       Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
       Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable

and it is just as legal to have messages headed with:

       Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
       Content-transfer-encoding: 8bit



- -- 
Merciadri Luca
See http://www.student.montefiore.ulg.ac.be/~merciadri/
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