Re: Unknown character sets

[jcl@xxxxxxxxxx (Jonathan Laventhol)]

> From: Craig_Everhart@transarc.com
> I like John K's suggestion of using ``x-unknown'' rather than
> ``unknown'' since it denotes private agreement.  The argument that you
> can always ignore x-anything is specious: you can ignore x-unknown
> character sets, and you'd have to do that unless you had some private
> (non-RFC) agreement about content.

Hi Craig --

Surely if there was a private agreement, you could use
"x-macintosh".  The case we're talking about is one where the
receiver and sender don't have an agreement, and the sender
isn't (yet) able to MIME-tag the character set, so the receiver
has to make something up.  The endpoing receiving MUA could do
something if it thinks it might help -- for example, the user
might have a MUA config file which says:
	jcl@deshaw.com: unknown=macintosh

so that if they get mail from me with charset "unknown" they
can read it as if it was tagged 8859-1.  This would be the case
if I lived in just-send-8 land, and everything was 8-bit
clean.  (Yes, this would work just as well with "x-unknown",
I'm just explaining where I think the agreement isn't.)
The intermediary JS8->ESMTP-8BIT gate mashed it into
MIME format as best it could.

In any case, aren't we trying to specify what the marker is?
As I understand it, IANA never specifies "X-*", so we have to
specify something else.  Suggesting that we *specify* an "x-*"
name looks still like a misthink to me.

Between which two parties are you suggesting there's a private
agreement?

Cheers,
J.