Message-Id: <v02140a01ad0bd73da0bc@[165.254.158.214]>
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Date: Sun, 31 Dec 1995 03:33:07 -0500
To: Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>
From: "Robert A. Rosenberg" <hal9001@panix.com>
Subject: Re: The use of 8-bit
Cc: Jacob Palme <jpalme@dsv.su.se>, ietf-drums <drums@cs.utk.edu>,
        Mail and News integration mailing list <mailnews-l@SEGATE.SUNET.SE>,
        moore@cs.utk.edu

At 1:39 12/30/95, Keith Moore wrote:

>> 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

A simpler way would be to fix the News Servers to force MIME and add the
charset (or a hierarchy basis) if there is no MIME or Charset indication in
the message posted by the user. This changes the problem from assuming a
default to insuring that the default is documented. I am suggesting that
this be done by the POSTING Servers only not the ones who are just echoing
a newsfeed (the latter is a separate issue).