From: Martin J. Dürst (mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch)
Date: Mon Nov 24 1997 - 06:28:25 CST
On Fri, 21 Nov 1997, Claus André Färber wrote:
> Leonid Yegoshin <egoshin@genesyslab.com> schrieb:
> > Defaulting 8-bit body as UTF-8 is error, look at RFC1428.
> > The reason for creating this RFC is not occasional.
>
> True, as is Defaulting 7bit to us-ascii. Well, specifying the charset is
> a good thing in any case. Requiring a ``Content-Type: text/plain;
> charset=utf-8'' header is acceptable.
>
> The default without a specification should be ``any interpretation the
> UA thinks is most useful'' based on the users locale, config settigs,
> heuristics, etc.
I agree. It is not a big problem to require bodies sent in UTF-8
to be properly labeled anyway. And it's how most implementations
currently work, including the newer browsers that support UTF-8.
And it is also how HTML works; it does not have a default charset,
because there is too much unlabeled practice with many different
charsets.
Regards, Martin.