Claus Faerber writes: > D. J. Bernstein <djb@cr.yp.to> schrieb/wrote: > > I'm not saying that Quoted-Printable had no short-term benefits for its > > short-term costs. I'm saying that, viewed from our long-term perspective > > eleven years later, the failure to require 8-bit transparency was an > > amazingly stupid decision. > From our present perspective, that's true. Back then, it might > have been the best solution. No. The failure to require 8-bit transparency was inexcusable. Every approach that failed to require 8-bit transparency could have been dramatically improved. Consider, for example, these three approaches: (1) Quoted-Printable; (2) Quoted-Printable plus ``you must handle unencoded 8-bit data too''; (3) pure 8-bit without this 7-bit garbage. Whether or not you understand that #3 would have been better than #2, surely you understand that #2 would have been vastly better than #1. > Further, remember that the first MIME standards date back to 1992. > Back then, Unicode was brand-new and UTF-8 only came with the 2.0 > version in 1996. Without UTF-8, you just could not even think > about using Unicode in message headers; and without Unicode, you > could not solve the charset-labelling problem. Get your facts straight. First, UTF-8 was introduced years before 1996, although under another name. Second, even without knowing about UTF-8, people _were_ thinking about Unicode in headers, and proposed several workable approaches. Third, even without Unicode, there were several solutions to the character-set labelling problem. Anyway, none of this is relevant to IETF's acceptance of 7-bit garbage in 1991, and none of it is relevant to IETF's acceptance of 7-bit garbage today. > The movement towards UTF-8 everywhere is quite new. Again, get your facts straight. The ``movement'' started with X-Open, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson a decade ago. RFC 2277, requiring UTF-8 support for all text on the Internet, is four years old. ---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago