Re: Another look at 8 bit transport for local mail

[Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Excerpts from internet.ietf-smtp: 5-Apr-91 Re: Another look at 8 bit t..
Erik M. van der Poel@sra (896)

> I agree that it is not all that farfetched for multilingual people to
> exchange multilingual messages. But do you really think that they will
> want boundary markers between the excerpts? I think they will want to do
> excerpts the way you did to Craig's message, i.e. with the "> " at the
> beginning of each line.

The encapsulation mechanism gives us a way to do this gracefully.  If
the above excerpt had been written in Swahili, and my current comments
were in English, this could be handled reasonably well by an
encapsulated body part.  Remember, the end user doesn't have to see the
encapsulation boundaries or headers!

This doesn't mean that a multilingual scheme isn't more graceful -- it
clearly is!  But until the world really coalesces around a SINGLE
multilingual scheme, we have to be prepared to accomodate multple
chracter sets, and the encapsulation mechanism at least offers us a
standard way to do that!