From: kehres(_at_)ima(_dot_)com (Tim Kehres)
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To: Internet Message Extensions <ietf-822(_at_)dimacs(_dot_)rutgers(_dot_)edu>,
"Donald E. Eastlake 3rd (Beast)" <dee>
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I believe that Dave Crocker's earlier comments about the need to
identify a character set when trying to obtain international
interoperability are equally pertinent in this context as well. Even
with the USENET stuff, national groups are available outside of the
enclave - I had access to many of the Japanese groups while living in
the San Francisco area. Here in Hong Kong I have access as well to
many of these groups, and it would be nice if I could easily identify
the character set. The HK groups for instance see regular
contributions from the USA - the idea of a confined enclave in this
environment is no longer appropriate.
I was assuming some significant changes in news whereby additional
information was associated with and distributed with each newgroup.
There are lots of things you would want this for besides content
default. It would, for example, be a good thing if each newsgroup
optionally could have associated with it the default group to which
responses would be sent to cut down discussion in non-dicussion
groups, the public key of the moderator so that you could authenticate
their digital signature on approved articles, etc., etc., etc. Of
course, it is easy to propose such things and infinitely harder to
implement and deploy them.
Your example of the pictures groups is an especially interesting one.
What would you propose for the default to be? The last time I
checked, people were exchanging GIF, JPEG, MPEG, TIFF, PCX, BMP, and
at times other image formats in some of these groups? Seems to me
that the proper identification of the content in these messages is
just as applicable as character set information.
You can always over-ride a default be being explicit. Or, if there
really isn't anything common enough to be the default, you could go
with the default default (:-) of plain US-ASCII text.
These are similar problems that all seem to call for the same type of
solution - if you expect for a recipient to be able to do anything
reasonable with the message you are sending - you need to tag it in
such a way that the recipient has a clue as to how to handle it.
Sure.
Anyway, just my $0.02 worth...
Best Regards,
Tim Kehres
International Messaging Associates Ltd
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Subject: MIME/news
Author: "Donald E. Eastlake 3rd (Beast)"
<dee(_at_)skidrow(_dot_)tay(_dot_)dec(_dot_)com> at Internet
Date: 12/1/94 1:08 PM
I guess this is the wrong mailing list but a thought occurs to me
based on a common theme in the messages from those that Ohta-san has
flogged into posting here. Most of them mentioned the use of ISO-2200
in jp.* newsgroups. This is probably an excellent point and indicates
the desireability of newsgroups having their own defaults. Thus all
the jp.* newsgroups could default to charset=ISO-2200-JP or whatever,
various *.pictures.* newsgroups could default to an image format, etc.
I guess that's ISO-2022...
Donald
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Donald