Received: from localhost by CS.UTK.EDU with SMTP (cf v2.9s-UTK) id MAA01524; Fri, 29 Dec 1995 12:36:12 -0500 Received: by CS.UTK.EDU (bulk_mailer v1.3); Fri, 29 Dec 1995 12:35:56 -0500 Received: from ester.dsv.su.se by CS.UTK.EDU with ESMTP (cf v2.9s-UTK) id MAA01496; Fri, 29 Dec 1995 12:35:54 -0500 Received: (from jpalme@localhost) by ester.dsv.su.se (8.7.1/8.7.1) id SAA08414; Fri, 29 Dec 1995 18:35:51 +0100 (MET) Date: Fri, 29 Dec 1995 18:35:51 +0100 (MET) From: Jacob Palme To: ietf-drums , Mail and News integration mailing list Subject: The use of 8-bit Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Many European alphabets use characters with the 8-th bit set much more than in English. Experience shows that it is very common that Europeans put such characters in news articles even though it is probably not legal. Many existing news software apparently produces such 8-bit characters. It seems to me that it is impossible to stop this practice. If it cannot be stopped, perhaps it should be accepted. Thus, perhaps the best would be to say that the default character set in news is ISO 8859-1 (just as it already is in HTML). For Americans, this would not be a problem since USASCII is a subset of ISO 8859-1. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jacob Palme (Stockholm University and KTH) for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme