On Sun, 5 May 2002, Jacob Palme wrote:
At 12:51 +0100 02-03-19, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:
No. Multi-language mail is more common than you might think. Two examples:
I got mail from someone in France this morning: The message was in English
but the .sig was in French.
When a fellow Norwegian posts in English on a mailing list and I answer
privately, I might well answer in Norwegian, quoting the English posting.
That is why we have MIME body parts. Put each language piece
into a separate body part, with content-language to indicate
its language.
The body part solution will work when the border between
languages is at a line boundary. However, what about text
like the following:
"I spent three years at Universät Lüneburg in Germany"
where the language break occurs twice in the middle of
a line!
You can use MIME parts for this as well, mark the parts as inline and make
sure you don't add newlines during encoding. The processing rules
describes fairly well how to decode it back together.
Gnus supports this. The extreme example is the Emacs "HELLO" page with
strings for all languages Emacs support -- sending the file as an email
results in 20-30 or so parts. Of course, it would be better to encode it
all as Unicode, but Emacs does not support Unicode well yet.
I haven't seen a client that handle the resulting mail in any sane way
though, people usually don't bother to implement the entire MIME specs.