Using Quoted-Printable (Re: Line Wrapping Question)

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Jamie,
you say:

>In Netscape, there is a preference toggle between "Allow 8-bit" and
>"MIME Compliant (Quoted-Printable)".  It defaults to 8-bit now, since
>there was great resistence to the use of QP when we made that the
>default in an earlier beta.  And this resistance was, in fact, from
>the very community that QP was designed to help: those with non-7bit
>languages.  Many of our European users told us that the chance of their
>recipients having only a 7-bit path was far, far less likely than the
>chance that their recipients were able to decode MIME messages.  Sad
>but true...

I was in the middle of some of the heated exchanges on this in Norway,
a typical (?) 8-bit market.
The problem with the Netscape toggle was that it was the same for Mail
*and for News*, at a time when Netscape was just about the only
newsreader that handled Quoted-Printable. (or "quoted-unreadable", as
one rather vociferous opponent names it).
(There now exists a second, called "knews", and I believe some of the
newer Gnus versions do it too).

We had the same sort of flak when we started using Q-P in mail 2 years
ago, and for almost a year we hacked mailers into using theoretically illegal
"content-transfer-encoding: 8bit", but when we recently went back
to using Q-P in mail, we didn't get *any* objection; the market for
E-mail had accepted MIME.

I believe having separate toggles for defaulting Q-P in Email and in
News would be good for the users.

     Harald A