Re: quoted-printable

[Johnny Eriksson <bygg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Let's say it is in a European language such as German.  Now, the vast
> majority of the characters in the message -- maybe even on the order of 99%,
> though I don't really know that much about the frequency table of letter
> usage in German -- will be characters without the high order bit turned on,
> i.e. legitimate ASCII characters.  A few stray characters, however, will be
> things with umlauts, and so on.

I don't know the frequency for German, but for Swedish the number of charac-
ters with the high bit set is about 2% in random text.  I checked this some
time ago, with the contents of the newsgroup "swnet.politik", which I regard
as random in more than one way...

> With quoted printable, this message can be sent in such a way that it is
> essentially readable in its "raw" form, on any ASCII terminal.  If we encoded
> it in base64, it becomes gobbledygook in the absence of decoding software. 
> This is the primary rationale (there are others) for the existence of
> quoted-printable, and I think it's a darned good one....  -- Nathaniel

In complete agreement,

--Johnny