> To me that is a good example of how email is flexible, and also simple. I fail to see how a complex encoding is "simple". (Maybe I should mention that there

> To me that is a good example of how email is flexible, and also simple. I fail to see how a complex encoding is "simple". (Maybe I should mention that there are complex rules about where that encoding can appear, and there's two variants of it) > It's flexible because it could support non-ascii text strings, without changing a thing. No, clients had to be upgraded to support it. > It's simple because the protocol doesn't care what the subject says. It only cares that it's an ASCII string. Well, sure; why would the protocol care about it? But at some point you're encoding the email for delivery (say, you're a web service) or you're an email client trying to display it. At that point, its a deceptively simple not-ASCII string. > but that doesn't take anything away from email's simplicity I'm arguing that you have a twisted definition of "simple".