From: Gaute B Strokkenes <gs234@cam.ac.uk>
> On Sat, 14 Jul 2001, dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org wrote:
> > From: Gaute B Strokkenes <gs234@cam.ac.uk>
> >> No way. Any mail client that is sufficiently clever to understand
> >> UTF-8 should understand all valid and registered MIME-charsets.
> >> After all, conversion libraries are both widely available and easy
> >> to use.
> >
> > Do you know of any that actually do?
>
> Actually do convert messages in arbitrary charsets to UTF-8 / Unicode,
> you mean?
No, I mean "understand all valid and registered MIME-charsets".
> > How about just supporting these: ISO646-PT, ISO10646-UTF-1,
> > NATS-SEFI and HP-DeskTop?
>
> I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Assuming these are
> properly registered charsets, it seems like a very narrow range to
> support.
Maybe "supporting at least these" would have been a better phrasing. They're
all valid and registered MIME-charsets. Do you know of a single mailer that
supports all 4?
> If we all had to upgrade
> our software to do so, I think a lot of people just wouldn't bother.
You're claiming on one hand that everyone's mailer should handle all sorts
of charsets, and on the other using one that doesn't support the only
charset that is RFC-mandated for a working mail program to support. (Yes, a
mailer that doesn't handle UTF-8 violates the appropriate RFCs.)
> It's the closest thing that we have to a common _universal_ charset.
You sure? Besides ASCII, what other charset can almost everyone read
(including the people who cut and paste into Unicode editors, because they
can read it)? There's no other charset (besides ASCII) that everyone with a
working mailer, no matter how minimal, can read.
-- David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Sat Jul 14 2001 - 16:11:55 EDT