Re: [EAI] Body parts

[John C Klensin <klensin at jck.com>]

--On Saturday, 12 July, 2008 14:38 -0700 Shawn Steele
<Shawn.Steele at microsoft.com> wrote:

>> But people don't send c-t-e 8bit. They send a lot of q-p or
>> base64, both of which obfuscate the data.
> 
> Part of my hope was that they'd be 8 bit aware and not need
> base64.  I'm also hoping to recommend UTF-8 not to save space,
> but to reduce some ambiguity about encodings.  In practice
> transmissions often loose encoding information and end up with
> some scrambled characters.

Shawn,

Really?  Your data collection sources obviously differ from
mine, but my impression is that we've seen very little
transmission loss or confusion in the last 10 or 15 years, at
least among MIME-conformant implementations that follow the
rules.  And many of the places where those losses actually show
up turn out to be among systems that either advertise 8BITMIME
but not support it, decide to send 8 bit data despite not
getting that announcement, or send MIME content-type information
and file names that are inconsistent with each other.

We also used to have a lot of problems with slight
incompatibilities among various flavors of UUENCODE, but it has
been a long time since I've seen any significant number of those.

For at least those classes of problems, sending UTF-8 directly
runs much more risk of data loss than Q-P or Base64 (although
local forms like Big5 are probably no better).

    john



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