Re: the evils of quoting

On Feb 3, 2004, at 9:37 AM, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

> 1. Header values don't have to span multiple lines and where necessary 
> special characters can be escaped.

You just built in an artificial limitation and a special case. So much 
for parsing it in 20 lines of code, and now some things people might 
want to do that you haven't thought of are no longer possible.

down that road lies exactly what we're trying to avoid here.

> 2. Obviously a mailng system isn't going to support windows 1252 or 
> ibm 439 or what have you: everything that's not 7 bit ascii must be 
> unicode.
>

why not? I think it's perfectly reasonable to assume we can (but not 
necessarily MUST) support those. After all, we do today, and today's 
system supports rational fallback alternatives. That's exactly why MIME 
multipart/alternative exists.

so why are we taking away existing features that work?