[Info-vax] Open Source on OpenVMS - A Progress Report

[JF Mezei]

When quoted printable first came out, I was very much against it. While
the ancient 822 assumed 7 bit paths, I don't know if there are still any
software writers who go out of their way to cut off the high order bit
of every byte and I am under the impression that in real life sending
the actual C cedilla character instead of some =XX representation would
work fine.

Binary newsgroup also used to use uuencode, then base64, and now, I
think they use something called Yenc or whatever it is called.


Quoted printable is stupid because the internet is now 8 bit clean (no
more uucp or other older technologies). And if Microsoft hadn't insisted
on sending paragraphs as a single very long line, there really wouldn'T
be a need for it.


However, in the end, the world has progressed, and quoted prontable,
mime and that Yenc thing are now de-facto standard and have been for
many years.  If you choose to restrict yourself to ancient software
which doesn't cope with those, then complaints should be directed at
yourself.


There comes a point where a technology, no matter how silly, has become
so widespread that you can't really fight it anymore and you need to
learn to accept it.

I think Firefox and W3C came in at the very last possible minute to
rescue the HTML/javascript from the hands of evil Microsoft and convince
web designers to realise that there are official standards to be adhered
to, and those weren't set by Microsoft.

But the boat for quoted printable sailed a LONG LONG LONG time ago and
you can't stop it anymore.

Those of us with modern clients have the option go send HTML (an option
which shoudln't exist) or plain text. Just looked at Thunderbird and I
don't think we have any options on how "plain text" ends being being
encoded. So it isn't our fault if some text is quoted-printable encoded
behind our backs.