Re: [9fans] simplicity

[John Stalker <stalker@maths.tcd.ie>]

> > I'm not sure your solution is always the correct one, or is implementable.
> > Should an MTA silently convert incoming mail to the local character set?
> 
> it doesn't have to.  upas/fs does given the character set in the file.
> i've thought about the mta doing it.  i think that would be a nice solution.

In my case this was being done by the MUA, which was mh rather than upas,
but the net effect is the same.

> > I'm not sure I want that.  The other program in my example was a web
> > browser reading from a pipe.  It can't know whether it's processing data
> > as it comes into the system or data which is already there and has already
> > been converted, unless either it can trust the meta tag in the document to
> > have been updated or the conversion is pushed out into the network layer.
> 
> what is the standard.  if the encoding in the header header is x does that me
> an
> that the encoding in the html header needs to be x?  what happends if they
> differ?
> 
> the only case that makes sense is that they have to be the same.  but html
> and http generally run counter to common sense. ;-)

I don't know what happens if they differ.  In my case they were the same, but
the problem was that both programs assigned themselves the job of converting.
I think that the mailer SHOULD NOT, to use the RFC capitals, convert the
character set if it is handing off the display job to another program.  In any
case that's the way I set things up once I figured out what was going on.
This is counter to the way the CRLF issue is handled, though.  There the network
standard is CRLF and systems which use other systems, including all the ones I use,
are expected to convert before sending and after receiving so no local programs
need to know about such issues.
-- 
John Stalker
School of Mathematics
Trinity College Dublin
tel +353 1 896 1983
fax +353 1 896 2282