- From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald.t.alvestrand@delab.sintef.no>
- Date: Wed, 19 May 1993 13:07:45 +0200
- To: Rick Troth <TROTH@ricevm1.rice.edu>
- Cc: scs <scs@adam.mit.edu>, pine-info <pine-info@cac.washington.edu>, ietf-charsets <ietf-charsets@INNOSOFT.COM>, dan <dan@ees1a0.engr.ccny.cuny.edu>
Rick Troth writes:
> Plain text is defined differently from system to system.
>On UNIX, plain text is ASCII (now ISO-8859-1) with lines delimited by
>NL (actually LF). On NT, plain text is 16 bits wide (so I hear).
>That ain't ASCII, though we could be the high-order 8 bits for much
>of plain text processing, and that's fine by me. (memory is cheap)
>On VM/CMS, plain text is EBCDIC (now CodePage 1047) and records are
>handled by the filesystem out-of-band of the data, so NL (and LF and CR)
>aren't sacred characters. Now ... "mail is plain-text, not ASCII".
Please, gentlemen.....read the RFC.
As long as you send mail over the Internet, claiming MIME compatibility,
the bits on the wire have to conform to the MIME convention, *NOT* to
the local convention, whatever that is.
The omission of a character set label from text/plain
MEANS THAT THE CHARACTER SET IS US ASCII.
A message that contains characters with the high bit set CANNOT BE US-ASCII,
and therefore, a text/plain message without a charset= label in it
that has such characters IS NOT LEGAL MIME.
So, when SMTP strips the 8th bit, it gets what it deserves.
This was ******NOT******* an oversight. This was deliberate design,
designed to promote interoperability. The proliferation of mail in strange
character sets without labels is *exactly* one of the things that the MIME
effort was meant to *remove*.
End of flame..............if you want a couple of tons more, read the
archives of the SMTP and RFC-822 groups. The last flareup is hidden under
"unknown-7bit" and "unknown-8bit" discussions.
Harald Tveit Alvestrand
--Boundary (ID uEbHHWxWEwCKT9wM3evJ5w)
Received on Wednesday, 19 May 1993 04:11:33 UTC