From: Jean-Marc Desperrier (jean-marc.desperrier@certplus.com)
Date: Tue Jul 17 2001 - 10:24:17 CDT
sommar@kairos.kairos.algonet.se wrote:
> > I don't agree with your assertion that raw 8 bit seldom causes difficulties.
> > It works only when everyone communicating uses the same locale.
> > I've been confronted to context where people who have different; non-US locale try
> > to communicate, and it causes lot of problem.
>
> I would however be brave to claim that raw 8 bit is the solution that
> gives least trouble. Of course, in context where everyone has only
> RFC2047-capable readers but use different charsets, RFC2047 is better.
> But in many groups the use of charset is homogeneous, whereas the mix
> of newsreaders is not.
But the problem is that when USEFOR is standardised, the use of charsets will no more be
homogenous.
There will be people using utf-8, and other using local encoding for headers in the same
group.
> > The programs that don't understand RFC 2047 now will not adapt to UTF-8 either
> > (within any short time frame at least).
>
> Not entirely correct. It is certainly true for a popular reader like
> Free Agent. However, I expect UTF-8 support for my mail reader long
> before RFC2047 support. To wit, I use mailx in a Telnet window, and all I need is UTF-8
> support in my Telnet client.
But getting UTF-8 by loosing ISO-8859-1 or ISO-8859-2 support is not very great.
I'd be very surprised if mailx is able to convert your message from ISO-8859-x to UTF-8,
and does not handle RFC 2047.
There's a way to get slrn to support utf-8, when running it under X11, by having it open
every message in utf-8 in a new window, but it's definitively not convenient.
And this works only when the whole message is in utf-8, headers and body.
> > Note : As there has been unofficial and undocumented use in headers fields of pure
> > 8 bit in various local encodings before the advent of this standard, some
> > newsreaders might choose to try to display illegal utf-8 sequence in the headers as
> > character in the local encoding, as far as they are able to adequetaly determine
> > local encoding. This should enable newsreaders respecting USEFOR standard to
> > interpret messages sent by newsreaders that do not respect it, because the
> > redondancy of utf-8 garanties that the probablility of non-utf8 sequence to be
> > legal utf-8 is very low.
>
> If it is non-utf8, then it is not legal UTF-8.
OK. Rewording :
[...] garanties that the characters of a sequence in a local encoding, if wrongly
interpreted as utf-8, would highly probably form an illegal sequence.
> And it does not really replace the NOTE I suggested for Subject. That
> note is not about display, but leaving the subject line unchanged.
It didn't intend to say that it should replace it.
There has been a misunderstanding here.