Jacob,
At 6:11 AM 12/8/94, Jacob Palme DSV-SU wrote:
One way of getting Americans to understand the views of people
I'm afraid that your opening, here, is extremely unhelpful. You might
consider refraining from attributing difficulties in the discussion to
ethnocentrism. There has been nothing in the content of my messages, or
others espousing similar views, that pertain to national original or
affiliation.
This is a technical discussion, at least as far as I am concerned.
Besides, personal insults are so much more fun than national ones.
Americans often send uuencoded or binhexed data in messages.
I could be wrong, but I believe that the practise extends to those in other
countries.
In any event, I happen to believe that the uuencode/binhex example is
entirely valid as a comparison to the sending of text in different
character sets. So, now I'll try to move beyond the distraction of
national reference...
In a note earlier today, I tried to distinguish the general case of these
kinds of practises. That is, in the strictest, bit-pattern sense, all of
these things do conform to the basic RFC 822 requirement. In the broader
sense of being interpretable, they don't. The difficulty primarily
pertains to labeling.
All of these practises are an attempt to add a special layer of
interpretation on top of the raw RFC 822 body. There is no debating the
need to do this. It is necessary. And RFC 822 gives no mechanism for
doing it in a standard way.
Mime does.
Mime is the standard method for layering additional structure on the body
and for labeling the different content. RFC 822 has no standard way of
doing it. That's why Mime was written. Mime is now the standard.
Therefore, Mime is the required method of declaring special encoding of the
body.
d/
--------------------
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg Consulting Phone: +1 408 246 8253
675 Spruce Dr. Fax: +1 408 249 6205
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dcrocker(_at_)mordor(_dot_)stanford(_dot_)edu