Message-Id: <199512291741.MAA12525@jekyll.piermont.com>
To: Jacob Palme <jpalme@dsv.su.se>
cc: ietf-drums <drums@cs.utk.edu>,
        Mail and News integration mailing list <mailnews-l@segate.sunet.se>
Subject: Re: The use of 8-bit 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 29 Dec 1995 18:35:51 +0100."
             <Pine.SUN.3.91.951229183201.7855P-100000@ester.dsv.su.se> 
Reply-To: perry@piermont.com
Date: Fri, 29 Dec 1995 12:41:26 -0500
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>


The problem is that you are wrong about what character set gets
used. The Russians are using COI-8. Chinese are using several
different encodings of their characters. ISO 8859-1 isn't the only
thing in use by far.

Henry Spencer's long neglected draft on News formats had the bright
idea of saying that consenting subnetworks of Usenet could use
whatever character set they mutually agreed to...

.pm

Jacob Palme writes:
> 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.