Re: tlug: Bill Gates should be MIME-encoded and left that way for a week

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

Sorry about the bandwidth waste, somebody should move ^C^C as far away 
from ^X^X as possible....

>>>>> "Scott" == Scott Stone <sstone@example.com> writes:

    Scott> On Fri, 6 Mar 1998, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

    >> Isn't there anybody at Microshaft in charge of making sure that
    >> Internet programmers can (and do) read RFCs?
    >> 
    >> In case you're wondering what I'm bitching about, Shift JIS is
    >> NOT encoded in seven bits.

    Scott> I think EUC and SJIS are 8-bit, and JIS is 7-bit... we
    Scott> encode our Japanese mailing lists into 7-bit JIS before
    Scott> sendmail sends out the messages...  something about
    Scott> compatibility, I don't know.. I just do what the Japanese
    Scott> people say they want :)

The compatibility is with RFCs 1468 and 1554.  You can get RFCs from
KDD (never thought I'd have a good word to say for those people; they
used to open and mung third parties' email) at

	      file://ftp.lab.kdd.co.jp/rfc/rfc####.txt

substitute the number (not zero-padded), or "-index" (including the
hyphen!) for "####".  Anybody else out there read RFC #1?  (I know,
some of you weren't born in 1969.  That's no excuse.)

Plain Internet mail without MIME extensions is supposed to be 7-bit.
I think it would be nice if people would stick to ISO-2022 7-bit
encodings in mail until Unicode (presumably in the form of UTF-7 or
UTF-8; by the time that happens there really won't be much reason for
restricting to 7-bit encodings) becomes the predominant encoding;
there's not much justification either from the point of view of
bandwidth or local efficiency for using SJIS or EUC instead of
ISO-2022-JP (aka JIS with careful handling of line breaks and stuff).

With MIME you can do whatever you want, more or less, because the
headers warn the poor receiving mailer that uninterpretable garbage is 
on the way.  However, it's not very intelligent to do that; you should 
only use stuff that (a) is in the MIME registry, or (b) you have
agreed with your correspondent in advance to use.

Oops.  I forgot.  (c) was developed by Microsoft.  "We don't have to
care, Mr. Veedle" as Ernestine used to say.

Steve

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