Message-Id: <199512300639.BAA19079@wilma.cs.utk.edu>
From: Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>
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>,
        moore@cs.utk.edu
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> 
Mime-Version: 1.0
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Date: Sat, 30 Dec 1995 01:39:08 -0500
Sender: moore@cs.utk.edu

> 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).

It would make far more sense to have the default charset set on a per-hierarchy
basis.  That way the fj.* groups could have their default charset 
(iso-2022-jp?), and the relcom.* groups theirs (koi-8?).  It would not be too 
difficult (well, not *technically* difficult) to set up a global registry of 
charset defaults, perhaps making it accessible through DNS.

Keith