On Thu, 1 Dec 1994, Donald E. Eastlake 3rd (Beast) wrote:
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 disireability 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.
It is probably the wrong mailing list, but anyway ... This idea is similar
to one I've been having recently. Namely, putting some kind of expert
system into my MIME efforts which picks good charset defaults for sending
mail and news to particular destinations. Rules would be something like:
If sending to an address *(_at_)*(_dot_)jp, use ISO-2022-JP by default
If sending to an address *(_at_)*(_dot_)se, use ISO-8859-1 by default
and
ISO646-SE as a fall-back for users with really old software
If posting to fj.* or soc.culture.japan, use ISO-2022-JP by default
Similar rules would apply for receiving non-MIME messages from such
places. These defaults can of course be overridden, and things become
interesting when sending to more than one destination, but it's better
than nothing.
I suppose the question is: should the MIME community, formalised by IANA,
act as a repository for such expert system rules, or should we just leave
it to someone to write a FAQ or design an extension to the mailcap system?
In a follow-up, Donald mentioned other uses for such an expert system
(e.g. the correct place to send follow-ups) but that's definitely outside
the scope of this mailing list.
Cheers,
Rhys.