ietf-822
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Re: 10646, and all that

1993-03-05 06:49:33
I think we have seen very convincing arguments that senders providing
this type of information to receiving UAs is likely to be desirable in
many cases.  I don't think we have seen an adequately strong argument 
for requiring it, i.e., including it as profile information in the
charset name, although we have gotten close.

Sorry, but I beg to differ.  In my opinion, language info is far from
being "required".  If I send you some email in ASCII, do I have to
tell you what language I'm using in that note?  I think not.  You can
probably tell just by looking at it.

Hey, Erik...

Read what I said again.   "Likely to be desirable in many cases".  "No
adequately strong argument for requiring...".

All I'm suggesting is that we provide a standardized way for a sender to
provide language info if it thinks that is useful.  If it doesn't, ok. 
If the receiver decides to ignore it, that's between the receiving
MTA/UA and its users, and not a network problem, nor should we try to
make a requirement in that area.

I think we are in agreement, not differing.

If I send you some email in ASCII, do I have to
tell you what language I'm using in that note?  I think not.  You can
probably tell just by looking at it.
  Clearly.
  And, if you send ISO8859-1, the answer isn't much different, as long
as I'm looking at it.  But, if it happened to be in Spanish (which I
don't read even slightly well), and the sender had decided to identify
the language (note, no use of "required" here), then a moderately smart
MHS at my site could route that body part to someone for translation
before delivering it to me.  Clearly one should not "require" such MHSs
either, but the example illustrates another case where language info
might be useful if someone chose to supply it.
  The 'default' in the absense of a language specification is clearly
"you guess", not any particular language.

   john

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