🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <BzBJIA.3AM@ra.nrl.navy.mil> atkinson@itd.nrl.navy.mil (Randall Atkinson) writes:
>>>   The second is to have a standard for marking the contents of
>>> messages in standard headers using standard syntax and standard
>>> tokens.  If I understand Henry correctly, he is putting together a
>>> draft, based on MIME, that addresses this second issue.
>
>>Didn't MIME specify some encodings already? And wasn't ISO 8859-1
>>the default for 8bit encoded text? (hm...)
>
>MIME only talked about Internet email, not news.  Henry's draft will
>apparently talk about news issues and so forth.

There is really precious little that is news-specific in this.  The one
thing that needs careful thought is adapting news to use of RFC-1342 for
encoding non-ASCII stuff in *headers*.  The MIME (RFC-1341) facilities
for use in the *body*, for stating which character set you are using and
encoding >7-bit sets to survive 7-bit transmission channels, appear to be
directly applicable without modification.  I'm debating how much detail
to include about them in the draft, but the bottom line will be "see MIME".
Almost everything in MIME has potential applications to news, and I don't
see any compelling reason to re-invent or re-specify it.
-- 
"God willing... we shall return."       | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
       -Gene Cernan, the Moon, Dec 1972 |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry