Date: Sat, 2 Nov 1996 16:08:39 -0800 (PST)
From: Mark Crispin <MRC@Panda.COM>
Sender: Mark Crispin <mrc@ikkoku-kan.panda.com>
Subject: Re: About that 8-bit discussion.....
To: Kai Henningsen <kai@khms.westfalen.de>
cc: drums@cs.utk.edu
In-Reply-To: <6K4djAOEcsB@khms.westfalen.de>
Message-ID: <MailManager.846979719.16435.mrc@Ikkoku-Kan.Panda.COM>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII

I disagree with your characterization of the groups.  Let me try a rephrase.

The core people problem is that there are several groups of people, each of
which have trouble understanding the others:

A. People who need only ASCII (mainly native English speakers), have no
problem with anything that doesn't touch ASCII, are very slow to install 8-bit
support (as they don't need it), and thus have serious problems with people
who demand that they have to invest effort and money in installing software
upgrades.  Many have installed MIME support, and as far as they are concerned
that solves the international email progblem.

B. People who need only a few non-ASCII characters (most western Europeans,
for example), who want to use their native characters, but can usually
decipher mail when those characters have been damaged. They want JustSend8
with ISO-8859-1 as a replacement implied standard character set for US ASCII,
are very slow to install MIME-support (as they don't think that they need it)
and thus have serious problems with both base64 and qp encodings.

C. People who need lots of non-ASCII characters (for example, people
speaking Greek, Arabic, Russian, or East Asian languages).  These people
cannot possibly live with stripped bits.  Some JustSend8; others use ISO-2022
so they can stay 7-bit clean; and still others are using MIME (sometimes in
conjunction with ISO-2022 or 8bit).  All are very distressed at the implied
notion from many in the (B) group that multinational email can be solved with
JustSend8 and all the world is ISO-8859-1.

As a member of the (C) group, I very strongly believe that MIME makes 8-bit
unnecessary.  8-bit is more efficient, but that's a transport and storage
issue.  It is not something that MUAs need concern themselves about.

I also very strongly believe that any use of 8-bit outside of a MIME context
MUST be ISO-10646, not ISO-8859-1.  Nor should it be one of the 10646
encodings that lets 8859-1 software pretend that it is 10646 compliant "but
localized for Western Europe."  Furthermore, we also need to have a way to
indicate locale, otherwise the East Asians will be (justifiably) upset because
of Han unification.

If we go incompatible with the 7-bit world of the past, let's do it right, not
a West-Eurocentric kludge.