On Tue, 29 Oct 1991 09:18:34 -0500 (EST), Nathaniel Borenstein wrote:
OK, so how do you really want to mark such mail? Does
Content-type: text; charset=iso-2022
express everything you need, as I would previously have supposed?
I don't think so. As my message(s) demonstrated, ISO-2022 in the way it is
actually used is a superset of US-ASCII, and it is not at all unreasonable for
a message which is entirely US-ASCII to be labelled as ISO-2022.
I don't think it is reasonable to require every UA used in Japan to check
whether or not ISO-2022 is actually used in a particular message. It is one
thing to ask that a constant string be added to all headers to bring their
mail into conformance; it's quite another to require an RFC-XXXX
implementation.
We need some syntax that says in effect `This message is US-ASCII, and it
*may* have ISO-2022 shifts into another character set.' Another possibility
is `This message is US-ASCII, and it *may* have ISO-2022 shifts into JIS';
this takes note of the fact that it is really a very specific usage and not a
generalized ISO-2022. This is what my TEXT/ISO-2022;charset=US-ASCII thing
was trying to say.
Here's another problem. TWG.COM evidentally has a mailer which chokes on the
Content-type: TEXT/ISO-2022;charset=US-ASCII
header. I think this is behavior we want to avoid. Fortunately, considering
that the recipient(s) at TWG are getting flooded with retransmissions, we can
expect them to fix it soon.
How about something like:
Content-type: TEXT;charset=US-ASCII;charset=ISO-2022/JISX0208.1983-0
or: Content-type: TEXT;charset=(US-ASCII,ISO-2022/JISX0208.1983-0)
or: Content-type: TEXT;charset=US-ASCII;altcharset=ISO-2022/JISX0208.1983-0
-- Mark --