ietf-822
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Re: distinguishing between utf-8 and gb18030

2003-01-17 07:04:08

On Fri, 17 Jan 2003 14:56:29 +0100
Arnt Gulbrandsen <arnt(_at_)gulbrandsen(_dot_)priv(_dot_)no> wrote:

Keith Moore writes:
but if both encodings do appear without tagging, and the difference 
can reliably be determined by heuristics, I do have faith that 
vendors will implement those heuristics.

My "reliability" may be your "nightmare".

Wearing my GUI programmer hat, I have faith that I can provide a good 
default when I need to ask the user for an encoding (say in a "file 
load" dialog). It will be right better than nine times out of ten, and 
when it's wrong the user can try a different encoding anyway.

Someone writing e.g. an MTA may want a tad more reliability than that.

well, I hope mtas never do tagging of unknown charsets.