META: message encoding/MIME types

[Ric Werme]

On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 3:10 PM, Roger H. Goun <roger at bcah.com> wrote:
>>> * Decode BASE64 or quoted-printable to 7-bit clean plain text

>> This should be decode to 8-bit clean plain text.

>  Nope.  Not if you're talking strict RFC-821/822 compliance.  The
> specs say ASCII.  ASCII is properly a 7-bit character code.  The RFC
> reinforces this, going so far as to give acceptable character code
> values as 1 through 127.  RFC-822, Section 3.3.

Oops, I forgot that argument.  Of course, I'd be happy to stick to the "96"
printable characters - decimal 32 - 127 plus CTRL/H-CTRL-M minus RUB.  That's
96, right?  Maybe shift-in and shift-out, but I forget what those are.  Ah,
CTRL/N and CTRL/O.  Some newfangled things like emoticons can pass unmolested,
of course, and don't have the jarring effect of seeing a yellow smiling face
in a sea of B&W text.

I'm using the "It's All Text" Firefox plugin so I can edit text areas in
emacs and the stupid tool does conversion for left/right quotes, ellipsis
and lord knows what else.  Ah well, it beats editing in text areas.