In the new draft there is a log of content-types. Basically the
standard should support a text and a non-text format. The non-text is
normally encoded in a text format. The basic text format is MAILASCII.
But 8859-1 or 10646 can also be ok. There should never be a EBCDIC, Mac or
a PC character code on the internet. Those formats are used when a
gateway transfers a letter from internet into an other character world, and
then the entire email is translated into the code set used over there.
If we allow any character set to be used the very good interoperability
of email today will vanish. You cannot expect evey site to handle every
character set in the world. Keep the allowed character sets on internet
to a very limited few, best is if the more limited sets are subsets of
the others.
Dan
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Dan Oscarsson Department of Computer Science
Lund Institute of Technology
e-mail: Dan(_dot_)Oscarsson(_at_)dna(_dot_)lth(_dot_)se Box 118
S-221 00 Lund, Sweden