ietf-822
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Re: UTF-7 vs. UTF-8 for fallback charset?

2001-12-05 09:35:59

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On Wednesday 05 December 2001 16:37, Keith Moore wrote: 
Is it safe to make UTF-7 the charset to use as "last 
resort" instead of UTF-8? 

No.  The only charset supported by all major MUAs is ASCII. 
 
Though I think you know very well what I meant, let me restate the 
questions more precisely ;-) 
 
When sending a textual mail, we have to choose a charset that is capable 
of representing all contained characters (internally, we use unicode) 
to use for the text/plain body part. We currently try us-ascii,<locale 
charset>,utf-8 (in that order). So you could see UTF-8 as a fallback 
for _text/plain bodypart charsets_. 
 
Now, we are discussing making UTF-7 that default instead of UTF-8, 
because it doesnt need further Content-Transfer-Encoding processing on 
top of it. 
 
Would we seriously decrease interoperability with other mail clients by 
doing this? And don't tell me: "Yes, with all those who don't speak 
anything but us-ascii" because they are not a likely target of a mail 
that someone sends, but which can't be represented in his own locale's 
charset. Also, the question is not "shall we use charsets other than 
us-ascii", but "is it OK to use UTF-7 where we'd else use UTF-8"? 
 
Hope I made my question clear enough this time. :-) 
 
Marc 
 
- --  
An der Prioritätenskala wehrhafter Demokratien gibt es nichts zu 
deuteln: Erst kommt die Stärke, dann Freiheit Hand in Hand mit der 
Gerechtigkeit und in der Nachhut trottet der Frieden hinterher. 
    -- Goedart Palm "Der Friedensnobelpreis und ein bisschen Krieg" 
       Telepolis 2001/10/13 (#9807) 
 
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