On Mar 6, 2010, at 19:32, Richard Troth wrote: > > > As email got fancier, some far sighted people cooked up MIME. The > encodings are more than sufficient to leave the message in the > recipient's reader, albeit encoded. (I like Base64, but QP should do > too.) The trouble is, if it's a MESSAGE and not an ATTACHMENT then it > would be nice if it were readable (which B64 clearly is not and even > QP is really not) with existing tools. > And the less said about "format=flowed", the better.
> I fear that the next phase for email will be not only UTF-8 but also > XML. Both good things. Both easily misused. (Something about guns > and feet, but other people's feet, not just their own. Ouch!) > But at least XML can accomplish in an orderly fashion that which "format=flowed" chaotically attempts to do. > You also said ... >> I hate EBCDIC! > > I think what you really hate is the unfortunate consequence of 60s > thinking w/r/t nationalization. The blind spot was that whoever at > IBM cooked up the original national character set scheme never thought > that some of us might use more code points than our local language > demands. Or worse ... actually CONNECT computers from different > countries. These days, it's INTERnationalization and INTERnet. I > wish our forefathers had thought ahead. > ASCII had the same problem, to-wit the attempt to deal with it in "C" by introducing the dreaded trigraphs. And the feature can't even be controlled with a "#pragma" because '#' is one of the characters that should be trigraph-encoded. But ASCII is healing faster than EBCDIC with acceptance of Unicode. I'm partial to UTF-8 because of its extraordinary compatibility with USASCII in programming languages. But with a pang of guilt because UTF-8 is clearly Western-Europe-centric. -- gil
