From: Lawrence Greenfield (leg+@andrew.cmu.edu)
Date: Tue Mar 04 2003 - 19:46:03 CST
Date: Tue, 04 Mar 2003 20:41:54 -0500
From: Bruce Lilly <blilly@erols.com>
[...]
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.
I agree that there's no way to deal with the existing mismash.
I don't see why the existance of other untagged 8-bit charsets
prohibits introducing one now.
I'm still unclear why users would prefer UTF-8 over their local
charset if they have already rejected a foreign encoding, RFC
2047.
Larry