"Sam" == Sam Roberts <sroberts(_at_)uniserve(_dot_)com> writes:
No, in fact Usenet (and mail) abounds with a large variety of
untagged 8-bit charsets.
Sam> Sorry, none of that is validly encoded, and has specifically NO
Sam> meaning, unless assigned one.
that doesn't stop untagged 8-bit in either From or Subject from
accounting for something like 30% of all Usenet text traffic outside
the primary English-language hierarchies.
RFC2047 is much less common; only a handful of hierarchies (mostly
Japanese) have any significant amount of it.
Sam> Backwards compatibility with standards compliant messages, that
Sam> I understand, but backwards compatiblity with invalidly encoded
Sam> messages?
compatibility with the real world is important too.
--
Andrew.