> I'm glad that HTTP was so pragmatic about this compared to purist e-mail with its base64. The issue with e-mail is that it's store-and-forward, and the serve

> I'm glad that HTTP was so pragmatic about this compared to purist e-mail with its base64. The issue with e-mail is that it's store-and-forward, and the server which receives your message might have to forward it to another server which understands only 7-bit characters (using the 8th bit for parity). This worry might not make much sense nowadays, but remember that e-mail is old, back from before "all bytes are 8 bits" won over all other variants. As for HTTP, it was specified over TCP, which has always used 8-bit bytes, so it doesn't have to worry about systems which mangle or reject data with a high bit set.