Erik M. van der Poel writes:
Erik> In email, there are two basic requirements:
Erik> (1) transmissibility
Erik> (2) readability
Actually, the burden of (2) resides with the composer: this is what
the multipart/alternative content-type is for. Any multibyte text that
basically resembles ascii should probably have an alternative,
readable-by-7-bit-users representation included, at least until MIME
decoders proliferate.
This has the advantage of giving us readability and transmissibility
without revising the spec :)
There is already a RFC that fullfills these requirements, namely
RFC 1345, which was developed for the same reasons.
The mnemonic encoding defined in this RFC has the properties:
1. it defines an encoding of a large repertoire of characters, in
principle the full 10646, to be transmitted without loss of information
over 7-bit transport protocols, and it is thus suitable for a
transport encoding.
2. it defines at the same time a fallback notation, which is readable
(with some limits, especially because of the limited character
set it uses for fallback) on 7-bit equipment.
3. it furthermore gives the ability in 8-bit character sets to handle
other 8-bit or 16-bit character sets, via the fallback notation,
while the native 8-bit character set is displayed fully.
--
Keld