Date: Fri, 29 Dec 1995 11:23:42 -0800 (PST)
From: Mark Crispin <MRC@Panda.COM>
Sender: Mark Crispin <mrc@Ikkoku-Kan.Panda.COM>
Subject: re: The use of 8-bit
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>
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On Fri, 29 Dec 1995 18:35:51 +0100 (MET), Jacob Palme wrote:
> 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.

Actually, it is very much a problem for *this* American, since my 8bit
character set is not 8859-1.  My screen uses a different 8bit character set
(although USASCII is a substitute of it too).

There is also, to my mind, a bit of a political problem in asserting that it's
alright to make Western Europe be the international default.  Although I
respect that Western Europeans may feel differently, I don't consider Western
Europe to be representative of the international character set user community.

I feel that such a move is very West-Euro-centric; even Eastern Europeans are
placed at a disadvantage, not to mention Asians.  Strong negative perceptions
would result.

If there is to be a "default" it should be something like Unicode.  Until such
time, it's better to leave the "default" unspecified and encourage the tagging
of all 8bit data with the appropriate MIME character set.