Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcvax!kth!sunic!maxim!prc
From: prc@erbe.se (Robert Claeson)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: 8-bit mail
Summary: Using teletex IA5 not so bad.
Message-ID: <742@maxim.erbe.se>
Date: 24 Jun 89 21:13:40 GMT
References: <759@isaak.UUCP> <127@hafro.is>
Reply-To: rclaeson@erbe.se (Robert Claeson)
Organization: Huh?
Lines: 31

In article <127@hafro.is> gunnar@hafro.is (Gunnar Stefansson) writes:
>From article <759@isaak.UUCP>, by woerz%isaak@isaak.uucp (Dieter Woerz):

>> Why do we have to wait? As far as I know, teletex is capable to send
>> all or nearly all characters used in the ISO 8859/1 writing world.
>> Let you MUA convert the ISO characters into teletex when sending mail
>> and convert it to ISO 8859/1 when reading mail.

>Actually, the MUA and MTA should be completely transparent in this
>regard. That's a heck of a lot easier to accomplish than to change all
>MUAs to conform to a given transformation standard. There is really no
>good reaon why existing mailers should fiddle around with the 8th bit.

So how should we then get the messages encoded in the IA5 teletex character
set? Get a teletex terminal? :> No, I want to be able to use my terminal
with the ISO 8859/1 character set, and I want to be able to communicate
with some guy on an IBM mainframe, a PC, a machine with 7-bit ISO 646
terminals (that's ASCII in the U.S.) or even a HP machine with HP's
terminals using the Roman-8 character set -- WITHOUT having to do the
character set translation in my brain (as I have to do now using RFC-
whatever mail). I'd really like to have some machine- or terminal-independent
representation of the messages and have a program convert its contents
into the character set my terminal happens to use. The question is just
if this translation should be performed by the MTA, the MUA or by some
program which the MUA pipes the message through before sending it to my
termial. And how should the particular program get to know what character
set my terminal is using (I think I just found a use for the SVR3 "CHRCLASS"
environment variable).
-- 
          Robert Claeson      E-mail: rclaeson@erbe.se
	  ERBE DATA AB