At 04:49 PM 5/25/99 -0500, Pete Resnick wrote:
>On 5/25/99 at 11:08 AM -0700, Mark H. David wrote:
>
>>Why is UTF-7 dead? It is the only encoding of Unicode that is
>>mail-safe in all environments. And therefore it is is the only
>>encoding possible for many, many languages (because many languages
>>can only be interchanged with Unicode).
>
>a) Most environments are now 8-bit safe, and more are moving that way
Most but not all. Perfectly working systems are in place that are
not 8-bit safe. My ISP - world.std.com - has 25,000 + customers
in Boston, and don't forsee fixing their non-8-bit safe mail system
any time in the near future. Why should they? It's standard,
and it works.
>all of the time. There's no need to waste the space on UTF-7 when
>UTF-8 will do.
I don't get it. It won't do.
>b) In those cases where only 7-bit is available, UTF-8 (which is a
>charset, not an encoding) can itself be encoded as quoted-printable
>or base64. Though this bloats the size of the message somewhat, the
>number of cases where it is necessary are getting smaller and smaller
>over time.
A poor other choice at best. Why go to such effort to decommission
a standard that makes systems work better, especially for Unicode,
now?
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:46 EDT