From: Erland Sommarskog (sommar-usefor@algonet.se)
Date: Wed Sep 30 1998 - 17:36:43 CDT
Way back on 24 Aug 1998 11:36:00 +0200, usenet-format-list@faerber.muc.de
(=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Claus_Andr=E9_F=E4rber?=) wrote:
> Actually, Unknown UTF-8 characters looks just as ugly as unknown =20
> charsets in RFC 2047.
Well, as long as we are only using Latin-1 characters, the UTF-8
representation certainly looks more palatable than the RFC2047.
Claus's name for instance would appear something like
Claus Andrý Färber
(I don't care to compute the coding for "é" right now.) Compare
this with the attribution above!
There is another thing worth pointing out as well. Say that I'm
reading news with an old text-based newsreader, which does not
understand MIME. True, it doesn't know about UTF-8 as well, but
as long it is eight-bit clean it doesn't really have to. It only
has to send the bytes to the tty, and if the tty displays UTF-8
correctly, I get the text correctly. And the tty in my case is a
Telnet client. No, the Telnet program I currently use does not
know UTF-8, but it is certainly much more likely that I will find
one in the future, than I will find a Telnet client that understands
MIME.
-- Erland Sommarskog, Stockholm, sommar@algonet.se