Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!intercon!amanda@intercon.uu.net
From: amanda@intercon.uu.net (Amanda Walker)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: 8-bit mail
Message-ID: <24-Jun-89.210351@192.41.214.2>
Date: 25 Jun 89 00:49:47 GMT
References: <742@maxim.erbe.se> <759@isaak.UUCP> <127@hafro.is>
Sender: news@intercon.UUCP
Reply-To: amanda@intercon.uu.net (Amanda Walker)
Organization: InterCon Systems Corporation, Sterling, VA
Lines: 43

This seems to be the year of the international character set :-).

A large proportion of our customer base is located in western Europe,
and so we've gotten pretty familiar with operating in environments that
are not limited to 7-bit U.S. ASCII.  Unfortunately, there are a lot
of standards to choose from :-), even if you stick to one from the ISO.

If and when mail and news paths become 8-bit transparent (which I think
would be a good idea), the situation will improve, as long as everyone
cooperates.  It sounds like a lot of the European UNIX community has
standardized on ISO 8859/1, which is a step forward from ISO 646 (since
it greatly widens the geographical area served by a single character set),
but it still only puts the problem off for a while, and is only really
useful for most of western Europe.  Eastern Europe, parts of the
Mediterranean, and the Pacific Rim countries are still left high and
dry (to name a few).  They don't have much presence in the global E-mail
networks now, but it will only increase.

Even in western Europe, character sets are still a problem.  There are an
awful lot of people out there still using the DEC Multinational Character
Set, which is similar to but not the same as ISO 8859/1.  There are a lot
of people using National Replacement Character Sets as well, although these
are starting to go away as time goes on.

One of the biggest problems I have in writing code for MUAs and NUAs (News
User Agents :-)) is determining what character set a given message is using.
One thing I would really like to see is for MUA's to start using the
Content-Type: field (or at least X-Content-Type:) in RFC 822 messages.
This way the MUA can have a set of common standards it knows about, and can
translate to whatever the user wants without lots of fancy footwork.  Also,
for some representations, such as ISO 2022 or subsets thereof, you can even
send things transparently through 7-bit channels as long as they don't filter
out the ESC character.

ISO 8859/1 is just the start.  Eventually, I hope the ISO finishes their
multibyte character set standard (10646?), but who know when that will
happen...

--
Amanda Walker
InterCon Systems Corporation
--
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