Masataka Ohta comments on my comment:
which use chars: =C4 =D6 (and =C5) (TeX: \"A \"O \AA )
This line is meaningless to me.
Dear me, didn't these MIME headers have any effect ?
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT
When Mr. Ohta (and many others behind non-ESMTP/8BITMIME mailers)
receive this, they get the headers as:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE
The line causing amazement was originally:
which use chars: Ä Ö (and Å) (TeX: \"A \"O \AA )
Then when it goes thru 8BIT -> QUOTED-PRINTABLE translation,
the result is "junk"... (This time mr. Ohta gets that QUOTED-PRINTABLE
encoded line with even larger bunch of equals + two hex chars,
as the equals-char gets quoted -- it being a special case..)
Btw: I deliberately expanded TABs away, because then you would
see wierd things:
TAB TAB TAB
For me those are just "TAB"-words separated with white-space,
but you may see something else due to Q-P translation at the
transporting mailers...
(Ah, never mind, for a MIME-veteran this all should be familiar..)
(Issues about how my Zmailer does that translation, and what rules
it uses is beyond the scope of this discussion, but it works for
my most common case: text/plain ... !)
Like Keith has commented earlier, "Just-send-8-bit without labeling
the character set is foolish"
To me, its foolish to try to have a standard to deny what is already
being used widely without any difficulty.
Within enclaves, yes. I can even read relcom newsgroups
(not that I can UNDERSTAND them, but I can get the russian characters
to my screen,) when I MANUALLY pick proper font for my xterm.
THAT is the place where I want some smart-smart news-parser + multifont
displayer to pick the information from within the message, preferrably
MIME-headers, and then do the displaying.
Not that Masataka's ISO-2022.. proposal would be that bad, it just
feels to me a lot more like an interface in between MIME-parsing system
(pine, for example), and the display terminal..
Your interpretation is very good. That is, MIME should have nothing to
do with encoding issues.
There we agree. I want to use MIME as a way to LABEL what
charsets and encodings are being used so that the smar
parser can use whatever means it has to drive the display.
But then, aren't we talking about the labeling in here ?
Sure it will take close to a million years ( :) ) before
all the world is using up to date software -- and then
we have gone ahead and made them obsolete...
... nevertheless, the MIME is spreading!
Masataka Ohta
/Matti Aarnio <mea(_at_)nic(_dot_)funet(_dot_)fi>