From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Thu Aug 01 2002 - 12:23:01 CDT
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@prodigy.com> writes:
> I'm not sure what that has to do with anything. The character set lack
> will never show up because they have the defined the world to be 7-bit
> ASCII. Case-free ASCII at that.
I don't want to belabor the point, but I think the distinction is
important. Mail has defined the *transport* to be 7-bit ASCII, not the
world; they're supporting every character set in the world, just via
encoding and decoding.
In other words, rather than treating mail as a simple transport for
unmodified content, they're treating mail like a transport that requires
encoding and decoding of data for transit. Sort of like the way that
Usenet treats binaries. It's ugly, as we all know from the vast
inefficiencies in binary encodings, but it does work, as we also all know
from the large numbers of binary groups on Usenet.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>