Re: SWEDISH CHARACTERS IN EMAIL: THE SUNET INITIATIVE

[Arnt Gulbrandsen <agulbra@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

In article <9411161838.AA12549@necom830.cc.titech.ac.jp> you write:
>> I guess my outside-the-little-mountainous-island
>> MUA is supposed to be able to read minds and guess that it's JIS.
>
>You don't have to, if what you receive is ASCII or JIS only.
>
>Supporting a single localization is easy.

And, perhaps, short-sighted.

I installed a a small sendmail replacement that does some ISO-8859-1
magic.  It's a fair default: If a message originating on a unix host
contains untagged 8-bit characters, in Norway it's almost certain to
be 8859-1.

I have discovered, however, that some people in the language
departments here want to send mail out of the country, to Slovakia
and places like that.  And samiskhs.no is in Norway but, unless my
memory fails me, uses 8859-2.  So while 8859-1 is by far the most
common, it's not universal.

>MIME charset mechanism is good to identify multiple
>localizations. But, if one decides to use 8bit Latin-1 only, a
>single localization, he does not need charset specification.

If one decides that, one is even more shortsighted as I am: I did at
least allow people to put in their own MIME headers.

--Arnt