Re: Whining about MIME formatted email

From: Alexander Viro (viro@math.psu.edu)
Date: Sat Sep 09 2000 - 23:43:00 EST


On Sat, 9 Sep 2000, Horst von Brand wrote:

> "Albert D. Cahalan" <acahalan@cs.uml.edu> said:
>
> [...]
>
> > That would be the "H=F8jland" in your .sig, right?
> > No problem, '=' is a standard character.
> >
> > My MUA has been RFC-compliant since before this "MIME" thing existed,
> > so I can see the full ASCII character set. That includes the carat,
> > underscore, back tick, backslash, vertical bar, at symbol, octothorpe,
> > and both braces.
>
> That is a really upsetting US/ASCII/English-centric view. How would you
> feel if the prevalent, "standard" character set didn't include 'h' and
> _your_ name showed up as "Albert D. Ca=68alan" elsewhere?!

Oh, come on. You are lucky enough to have the alphabet derived from Latin.

> That your MUA is RFC-compliant is nice, but in this case the RFC was
> shortsighted. My MUA and MTA are at least able to handle Latin-1 (and
> probably other charsets too, never tried).

Yes? How about we all settle down on UTF-8? MIME may be a good thing or
not, but it's _not_ a solution for internationalization problems. No more
than uuencoded tarball would be. Care to tell me how to put Latin-1 and
Cyrillic into the same text? No? Thought so. How about adding Greek into
the mix? Separate piece for every place where you change the alphabet?
Use of MIME for that is a bad kludge. It happens to work for English+one
more language cominations. Try it for French+Russian and you are in for
trouble. MIME may help to work around the b0rken MTAs that are not 8-bit
clean, but that's about it. It is nothing but a glamorized tarball.

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