The possible decision of people to go with 8bit in place of MIME is a
non-starter. The main reason is that doing so, without also converting
to MIME, is to continue sending unlabled objects of various content
types.
The demand for different content types is very low compared to the
demand for good national character support.
I must observe that just sneding 8bits has never been a solution to the
problems of sending different character sets in RFC822 mail bodies. It
will only get you some small efficiencies in sending unlabelled objects.
The efficiency is not the driving force, it is the functionality,
handling national characters with todays equipment.
It is not a good solution. It will not be a good solution tomorrow
either, or next year, or the year after that...\Stef
*I* know that, *WE* know that. The problem is that the typical new site
does not know it. They are not interested in reading RFCs, nor do they
have the time to do it. They are not interested in computers other than
as tools to do their work.
Some years ago most terminals, terminal emulators, printers etc, used
7-bit national characters, and there were no bigger problems with sites
sending non-7-bit mail. Today almost all equipment delivered use 8859-1,
but the delivered mail programs does not convert back and forth. You
can not blame the local system installer, he just installs what is
delivered, and does it according to the installation manual.
Thus we have to provide him with the tools needed. And as so many of the
new sites are commercial companies, a solution for just universities alone
does not help. Most commercial sites don't want to run software that
is not provided by the vendor they bought the computer from.
So computer vendors must have implementations of RFC-MIME et al that
has a functionality that is as good as or better than todays mail
handlers, as seen by the common user. We within the university organization
are willing to write down the requirements needed to get good
functionality, as a help to software implementors.
Jan Engvald, Lund University Computing Center
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