From: "Alain La Bont\i - ordi3dgsig" <alb@sct.gouv.qc.ca>
Date: Thu, 16 Oct 1997 14:38:49 -0700 (PDT)
[LHM] :
>Partly I am just being snide here. I haven't heard of any cases where
>the 1252/8859-1 distinction makes any difference for display: If a
>system has any CP1252-compatible fonts at all, it probably uses them
>for documents marked as 8859-1 as well. But documents in 8859-1 and
>8859-15 need different fonts, and confusion here is worse.
[Alain] :
So you do not have Internet correspondents in the following environments:
Macintosh (proprietary format)
OS/2 (in general IBM 850 character set)
8-bit enabled UNIX systems (in general a member of the ISO/IEC 8859 series)
EBCDIC 037 or 500 CECP, and many other variants
I do have such correspondents. The easiest common denominator requires an
8-bit ISO standard.
So far *there is* data loss in French even if in some case the repertoire
for French is complete in the recipient's environment (while in others it
is not, for example in EBCDIC, for the only reason that the coding space
fits, maximally, in dimension, with the coding space of ISO 8-bit graphic
character sets [191 characters, no more!], even if the encoding is
different -- and then there is not enough room, unless we have a new ISO
table).
Actually, I think we agree. Currently (until 8859-15 is implemented),
there is no 8-bit character set available across platforms that
fulfills the requirements for French. So, even if you include some
non-Latin-1 characters in a document, however they are coded, you gain
nothing by admitting it in the MIME header. If you claim to send
8859-1, readers on the same platform will still see the characters
correctly, and others will see nonsense instead of the extra
characters.
But as a matter of principle, your mail is non-conforming when it
contains characters outside the indicated MIME charset. Giving the
correct charset (if you can find the MIME registration) would make it
possible for MUAs to warn the user about the possibility of garbage
characters (when the appropriate font is not available).
Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@diku.dk> (Humour NOT marked)
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