formats, again

[Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM]

Andrea Vine replies to my post thus:

>>>
Sorry, but MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, RFC 2045-2049) and
quoted-printable are the standard, and are often out of the control of the
user.  Email clients should handle MIME and quoted-printable without the
knowledge of the user.  Whether the list server can handle it is another story,
but I assure you that every message I send is reasonably MIME compliant, and if
there are 8-bit characters in the text, they are encoded as quoted-printable.
<<<

"The standard"...

Q: How many Microsoft programmers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. They just declare darkness to be the standard.

I don't know if MIME quoted printable is automatically set up by MS's emailers,
or, if so, whether that's what causes you to call them "the standard". I do know
that at the office (as now) I get my email through Lotus Notes, the company
standard over which I have no control, and I see those godsrotted equal signs
all the time. (Hmm... what does your mailreader do on the digest, which has all
sorts of stuff mixed together? That's how I subscribe.) My personal account is
on my ISP's Unix machine, which I access through terminal emulation, and there
too I see the [unprintable] "quoted-printable" format.

Repeat, repeat, repeat: There IS NO universally-readable format except plain
ASCII.

-- Mark

  Mark A. Mandel : Senior Linguist : Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com
    Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : 617 796-0267
 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com/