ietf-822
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Re: 8-bit transmission in NNTP

1994-09-18 20:08:35
Well, ISO-2022-INT-* does not work on the majority of internet netnews
nor email sites today, as there is no support for it.

I think I need to make this more precise. As I have written earlier
there is no doubt that ISO-2022-INT-* works, when the  nessecary
support is present. 

The problem arises, when no support is present. I would believe that
the message then gets thru anyway, but when displayed on equipment
without 2022 support, the message becomes non-intelligble.

If ISO-8859-1 is displayed on equipment without 2022 support, the message
becomes non-intelligble.

If mnemonic is displayed on equipment without 646 support, the message
becomes non-intelligble.

That is,
when the 2022 shifts are not honored, the message is displayed
most likeky in another character set, and the characters shown will
most likely have no correlation to the ones intended. 

The situation is no different for ISO-8859-1 or mnemonic.

Mnemonic might be a useful convention in a small community with European
culture in a special environment where 646 IRV are widely supported but
2022 are not. And even then, viewing it is quite uncomfortable.

Outside the community, the resulting encoding is completely unacceptable,
because we already have a lot friendly ASCII-transliteration systems of
our own languages.

2022 conformant equipment can be found all over the world, but
in some significant areas it is not widespread. This include Europe
and the Amercicas.  You cannot assume that 2022 conformance is
available on all Internet connected equipment.

For these 3 years, I have had no trouble in reading ISO-2022-JP encoded
Japanese mails on X terminals of conference terminal rooms all over
the world in Europe (Amsterdam and Prague), US and Canada.

Note that graphic displays are a lot more widely available than Ethernet
interfaces.

                                                Masataka Ohta

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