Re: UTF-7 is dead

From: Pete Resnick (presnick@qualcomm.com)
Date: Tue May 25 1999 - 17:49:38 EDT


On 5/25/99 at 11:08 AM -0700, Mark H. David wrote:

>Why is UTF-7 dead? It is the only encoding of Unicode that is
>mail-safe in all environments. And therefore it is is the only
>encoding possible for many, many languages (because many languages
>can only be interchanged with Unicode).

a) Most environments are now 8-bit safe, and more are moving that way
all of the time. There's no need to waste the space on UTF-7 when
UTF-8 will do.

b) In those cases where only 7-bit is available, UTF-8 (which is a
charset, not an encoding) can itself be encoded as quoted-printable
or base64. Though this bloats the size of the message somewhat, the
number of cases where it is necessary are getting smaller and smaller
over time.

pr

-- 
Pete Resnick <mailto:presnick@qualcomm.com>
Eudora Engineering - QUALCOMM Incorporated
Ph: (217)337-6377 or (619)651-4478, Fax: (619)651-1102



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