From: Bruce Lilly (blilly@erols.com)
Date: Tue Mar 04 2003 - 19:41:54 CST
Henry Spencer wrote:
> On Tue, 4 Mar 2003, Lawrence Greenfield wrote:
>
>>People using mail readers and IMAP servers to read netnews is one
>>factor why RFC 2822 compatibleness is a good thing.
>
>
> But if 15% of the news traffic is already incompatible, that battle is
> irretrievably lost, and reader/IMAP implementors need to deal with the
> real world instead of some rosy 2822-compliant fantasy.
You're not paying attention; it is *necessary* to know the charset,
and use of untagged 8-bit charsets obviously provides no way of
identifying the charset. There is no way "to deal with" that.
To the extent that some news traffic and some mail traffic is
non-compliant with the relevant standards, that is a problem for
those who have decided to ignore the standards. *If* there had
never been use of untagged 8-bit charsets, it *might* be
possible to introduce a blessed 8-bit charset now, but that's
not the real situation; _that's_ the fantasy.