- From: <Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no>
- Date: Tue, 02 Jul 1996 16:44:34 +0200
- To: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
- Cc: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
RFC 1428, page 3.
A site may "upgrade" to MIME en-masse by implementing MIME conversion
for all messages leaving the site. For text messages, the body can
be converted by adding a MIME-version header and a Content-Type:
Text/Plain with the character set in use in the site, provided the
site uses a single character set.
An appropriate Content-Transfer-Encoding header line must be added to
indicate any encoding that may be necessary.
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: Text/Plain; Charset = ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
If no information about the character set in use is available, the
gateway should upgrade the content by using the character set
"unknown-8bit". The unknown-8bit value of the charset parameter
indicates only that no reliable information about the character
set(s) used in the message was available.
..................and on page 5:
The interpretation of the "unknown-8bit" is up to the mail reader.
It is assumed that in many cases the human user will be able to
interpret the information and choose an appropriate character set or
pre-processor.
It is not widely used, as far as I know; any sane person would avoid it if he
could. So should we!
Harald A
Received on Tuesday, 2 July 1996 07:51:20 UTC