Bruce Lilly writes:
For gateways to work at all, either the user agent must preserve charset
and language information in some way that it can be used by gateways
[ or it must use RFC 2047 ]
Specifying ``UTF-8 everywhere'' removes the need to add charset tags to
individual pieces of data. The message writer converts the local charset
to UTF-8 and then discards the local charset information.
As for languages: Exactly which gateways use language information?
Anyway, the notion that a gateway _has to_ use language information---
information that almost no messages have---is patently absurd.
---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago