From: Bruce Lilly (blilly@erols.com)
Date: Fri Sep 27 2002 - 16:34:01 CDT
Charles Lindsey wrote:
> In <3D89F819.9030601@alex.blilly.com> Bruce Lilly <blilly@erols.com> writes:
>
>
>
>>Claus Färber wrote:
>
>
>>>There are a lot of mail<->news
>>>gateways _today_. Will they correctly convert a header with unencoded
>>>UTF-8, as it is proposed for news, to RFC 2047/2231, which is needed for
>>>email?
>
>
>>and an obvious followup is:
>>If so, if an article arrives as mail with tagged (charset and language)
>>extended text using 2047/2231, and these are converted to untagged UTF-8
>>for news, will the nes->mail gateway re-encode with yags (specifically
>>with the language tag that was present in the original, and with the
>>same charset as the original)?
>
>
> I see no requirement that it should end up with the same tags or charset
> as it started out with. Gatewaying is not, and never has been, such a
> precise art as that.
If compatibility is maintained, using MIME, there is no reason
to lose any information from the tags. That means less work
for gateways (fewer things to go wrong) and less frustration
for users (who can be surprisingly sensitive about such things).
Conversely, with raw UTF-8 there is no efficient way to maintain
that information.