- 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