🚀 go-pugleaf

Sorry about the late reply.  I've got a slow feed. :-(


> >Perhaps the best approach for the American community would be to avoid
> >using the ESCAPE that is problematic in netnews and the 8th bit that
> >is problematic in both email and netnews, and to use a Viet-like or
> >Simonsen-like method, possibly together with an alt.chinese.text-like
> >method.  (And this is what you've started doing, right, Steve?)
> 
> Erik,
> 
>   I hope you are really intending that we collectively move to some
> MIME-derivative that can handle these existing interim formats, the
> public non-standard formats you've mentioned, and also that will
> handle the formats we should all be headed towards (namely ISO-8859-*
> and ISO-10646) along with non-text encodings for GIF, TIFF, and audio.

Well, yes, in the absence of MIME headers, it is difficult to tell how
the contents of the message are encoded.  (But if people really wanted
to, they could treat the

	Newsgroups: soc.culture.vietnamese

header as if it also said

	Content-Type: text/plain; charset=viet

or whatever, and similarly for the other encodings that I mentioned.
Needless to say, I'm mostly kidding here.)

In other words, MIME headers definitely get my Yes vote.

Re: "the formats we should all be headed towards", it would be nice if
we all had the same opinion, but I'm not sure that that's the case.

Also, once people put in a lot of work to support what you're calling
"interim formats", people may not be willing to change things yet
again after that.  The old "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude
may then rear it's ugly head.

The fully anticipated reply to this is of course that we should then
skip these interim formats and go straight to nirvana.

Well, I wish those people the best of luck.  In the meantime, I will
watch.  I like to watch.
-
-- 
Erik M. van der Poel                               erik@poel.juice.or.jp