From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Jul 01 2002 - 06:10:43 CDT
In <yl7kkgxxvf.fsf@windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:
>Erland Sommarskog <sommar-usefor@algonet.se> writes:
>> This is something I like to be strengthened, but I don't know really
>> how. SHOULD is definitely not right. "should as a matter of good
>> practice" maybe.
I am a bit dubious about using "should" in contexts where people might
read it as "SHOULD".
>Something like:
> It is recommended, as a last recourse, that characters in unknown
> character sets be passed unaltered and displayed in the default
> character set so long as they are not control characters in that
> character set. This is better than altering or rejecting the
> characters since the user will at least have some chance of making
> sense of the text.
Likewise ising "recommended" where "RECOMMENDED" might be (mis)understood.
Better to keep such advice in a NOTE. I now have:
Encoding by other means is not compliant with this standard.
Nevertheless, encoding using other character sets (with no indication
of which one beyond the user's ability to guess based upon other
clues in the article, or custom within the newsgroup) has been in use
in some hierarchies, and such usage may be expected to continue for
some period after the introduction of this standard. Reading agents
MUST support the use of UTF-8, [RFC 2047] and [RFC 2231] in headers
and they MAY, when it is detected that none of these has been used,
attempt to interpet the header according to whatever other character
set can be deduced, or has been configued as a default by the reader.
NOTE: It is possible to determine, with a high degree of
accuracy, when a given text containing octets with the 8th bit
set was not encoded using UTF-8, and using this test to recover
such non-compliant texts is therefore commended where no other
harm could arise.
Hopefully, that also emphasises that those "non-compliant texts" are a
temporary aberration that really ought to disappear once this standard
becomes established. Jean seemed to be concerned to make that clear.
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5