SWEDISH CHARACTERS IN EMAIL: THE SUNET INITIATIVE
The Board of Directors for the Swedish University Network, SUNET, has
started a project to deal with the problem of Swedish characters in
electronic mail. The current situation, in which several different
character sets are used simultaneously, is clearly unacceptable.
Agreed. But it's just unified localization. It's not easy but is not so
terribly difficult.
A typical symptom of this -- when the recipient sees "EDV" instead of
Swedish characters -- results when a mail transportation program which
handled the letter on its way from the sender to the recipient changes
the high bit from one to zero in every octet/byte. This behavior is
nevertheless completely in accordance with the SMTP* standard which is
used in SUNET and the Internet.
What we, Japanese, has been doing for these 10 years for e-mail and
News is to use 7bit encoding of ASCII, JIS X 0201 and JIS X 0208
character sets [RFC1468].
You can do the similar thing with Latin-1.
You don't need MIME at all.
This means that the former SUNET recommendation to use the Swedish 7-bit
character set in electronic mail will no longer be valid after January 1st,
1995.
For the smooth transition, you can even design 7bit mixed encoding of
Swedish variant of ISO 646 and right part of Latin-1, which makes MIME
even more unnecessary.
On the other hand, we do not consider it appropriate at this time to
recommend MIME for use in Internet News* -
I'm afraid you are creating the chaos of babel.
Masataka Ohta