RE: CHARSET considerations

[Laurence Lundblade <lgl@nwnet.net>]

I haven't followed this discussion, but Pine does do a few things with
character sets.  For example if you set Pine to use ISO-8859-1 and send an
all ASCII message it will tag it US-ASCII (instead of ISO-8859-1).  Also,
it's smart enough to display the lower 128 for all incoming messages in
the ISO-8859-X characters sets and greek the ones it can't if the
character set of the receiving Pine is US-ASCII or ISO-8859-X.  Thought
that was what required for minimal MIME compliance.

Hope I haven't upgraded the sin from omission to comision....

LL


On Fri, 14 May 1993, Mark Crispin wrote:
> Steve -
> 
>      Thanks for your comments.  You needn't convince me; I've been involved
> with the MIME charset issue for a long time (you'll note that I am one of the
> authors of the ISO-2022-JP spec).  In defense of the other Pine team members,
> the sin is one of omission rather than of comission; they wanted to do
> something about character sets and didn't want to wire in a table of legal
> values (since it might change).
> 
>      I've suggested that as a first pass the charset should only be settable
> in the system config file, and that the charset always be coerced to US-ASCII
> unless the text contains 8-bit characters and/or has ``funny'' control
> characters such as ESC or SI/SO.  More work would definitely be needed in this
> area, but you'll appreciate that there are other, higher priorities just
> now...
> 
> -- Mark --
>