INTERNET-DRAFT Charles H. Lindsey Usenet Format Working Group University of Manchester April 2001
6.21.2. Content-Transfer-Encoding Posting agents SHOULD specify "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit" for all articles not written in pure US-ASCII and not requiring full binary. They MAY use "8bit" encoding even when "7bit" encoding would have sufficed. They SHOULD specify "base64" when the content type implies binary (i.e. content intended for machine, rather than human, consumption). NOTE: If a future extension to the MIME standards were to provide a more compact encoding of binary suited to transport over an 8bit channel, it could be considered as an alternative to base64 once it had gained widespread acceptance. Posting agents SHOULD NOT specify encoding "quoted-printable", but reading agents MUST interpret that encoding correctly. Encoding "binary" MUST NOT be used (except in cooperating subnets with alternative transport arrangements) because this standard does not mandate a transport mechanism that could support it. Injecting and relaying agents MUST NOT change the encoding of articles passed to them. Gateways SHOULD NOT change the encoding unless absolutely necessary.[Previous Up Next]
See also previous draft (03): 6.17.2. Content-Transfer-Encoding
See also previous draft (02): 6.15.2 Content-Transfer-Encoding
See also previous draft (son-of-1036):
See also previous draft (rfc-1036):