ietf-822
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Re: Why we're in this mess

2003-01-15 15:53:00

Bruce Lilly writes:
"identify" and "untagged" are diametrically opposed.

An out-of-band specification of all text as UTF-8 is just as informative
as an in-band tag.

I see that Lilly wrote ``Bruce Lilly'' instead of ``=?us-ascii?Q?Bruce?=
=?us-ascii?Q?Lilly?=''. Did he therefore fail to identify the charset of
his name? Does software have to guess whether he's using ASCII or EBCDIC
or something else?

Of course not. All (untagged 7-bit) text is identified, out of band, as
ASCII. See, for example, RFC 822.

---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago