Re: printable wide character (was "multibyte") encodings

[Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxx>]

To:  Rick Troth <troth@rice.edu>, scs@adam.mit.edu, moore@cs.utk.edu
Subject:       Re: printable wide character (was "multibyte") encodings
Date:          Thu, 13 May 93 22:35:26 CDT

>         Keith,  you left this part out:
> 
> >>                                            The point is
> >>      that the richtext parser's front-end "get a character"
> >>      primitive would get a wide, multioctet character.  (The
> >>      special '<' character would therefore appear as a 16- or
> >>      32-bit quantity with value 60).
> 
>         This is the part to which I specifically agree, saying:
> 
> >       Yes!
> 
>         The reasoning is:
> 
> >>                                  Recalling the proper
> >>      definition of "byte", however, we can if we wish continue
> >>      to think about byte streams, as long as we remember that
> >>      a byte may have more than 8 bits.   ...
> 
>         And if SMTP remains an  "octet stream",  fine.
> (I think we're closer in agreement than you think we are)
> 

Perhaps I was being imprecise.

I am specifically opposed to having the canonical form of a MIME
content-type be anything other than an octet-stream.  This implies
that all content-transfer-encoders take an octet-stream as input.

Keith

"You can have any kind of byte you want, as long as it is 8 bits :-)"