On Tue, 30 Apr 91 13:10:14 +0900, Erik M. van der Poel wrote:
I know of several international mailing lists where people have to
resort to horrible kludges such as "Alain LaBonte/". This guy has to
be aware of the ASCII email world, and has to type "e/" for e-acute.
These people are really frustrated with today's minimal support for
other character sets. One of the main reasons for forming ietf-smtp
and ietf-822 is to discuss extensions for these people, I think. How
do others feel about this?
I agree that this should be on the table.
However, it should be a separate document from the Content-Type and Content-
Encoding RFC. These extensions should be layered on top of the Content-
Type/Content-Encoding mechanism in a separate document, for the same reasons
that the IP document does not talk about SMTP reply codes.
I should also point out that no matter *what* the RFC might say, the use of
least common denominator will not go away. You will still need kludges to
send mail to people who don't have upgraded mailers. I hope that quoted-
printable will fit this bill, but some of what I've been reading is worrysome.
Speaking as a network implementor for ~15 years, I'd claim that an network
implementation never gets into trouble by having minimal expectations of the
other end, but gets into *big* trouble by having optimistic expectations.
-- Mark --