ietf-822
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mail for Thai language

1993-04-14 03:06:25
Dr. Yunyong Teng-amnuay wrote on the smail mailing list:
Thai language has its own small character set (less than a hundred) and
so we use the remaining space in the ASCII table for the character set.
... we just need the extra bit to make our life easier without going to
multi-byte like the Japanese language. ... So I don't know much about
this MIME things and just wonder [what] do we Thai people need to make
our language part of the ... the mail system? we are on the verge of
wide-spread use of the email system in Thailand.

Strictly speaking ASCII is a seven bit character code and there are no
"reminaing space". Internet mail as specified in RFC822 was designed to use
seven bit ASCII only, and MIME is an effort to change that problem (among
other things). To be able to use the Thai character set with MIME you need
a suitable identifier that says to the receiving mail reading program that
the data is characters coded with this Thai standard. 

The way to do this is to register a identifier with IANA (The Internet
Asigned Names Authority?) Character set identifiers starting with "X-" are
reserved for experimentation, so you could use something like X-Thai to get
a working system. 

If I understand things corectly IANA will only register the charset name if
there is a standard that defines it or it is described in a RFC (the kind
of document that define how the internet should work). 

Three things not to do are:

1. To send Thai characters as eight bit mail without using MIME. 

2. Use an X- charset for widespread usage. X- names are for experimentation
   and shouldn't be avoided in "production usage"

3. To use one of the charset identifiers already registered for other eight
   bit character sets. 

All these three things will lead to confusion and inoperability.
  ---------------
  Christer Romson               Phone: Int. +46 - 8 33 86 00
  Komunity Software Int.               Nat.  08 -   33 86 00
  Saltmatarg. 7, 2 tr.          Fax:   Int. +46 - 8 33 66 10
  S-113 59  Stockholm                  Nat.  08 -   33 66 10
      SWEDEN                    Email: christer(_at_)Sue(_dot_)KOMunity(_dot_)Se

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