From: D. J. Bernstein (djb@cr.yp.to)
Date: Wed Jan 15 2003 - 16:53:25 CST
Bruce Lilly writes:
> "identify" and "untagged" are diametrically opposed.
An out-of-band specification of all text as UTF-8 is just as informative
as an in-band tag.
I see that Lilly wrote ``Bruce Lilly'' instead of ``=?us-ascii?Q?Bruce?=
=?us-ascii?Q?Lilly?=''. Did he therefore fail to identify the charset of
his name? Does software have to guess whether he's using ASCII or EBCDIC
or something else?
Of course not. All (untagged 7-bit) text is identified, out of band, as
ASCII. See, for example, RFC 822.
---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago