Re: MML: The Summation

["Edward J. Sabol" <sabol@alderaan.gsfc.nasa.gov>]

Excerpts from mail: (18-Nov-98) Re: MML: The Summation by Vladimir Volovich
> I think that this is a BAD THING (TM) Gnus MUST NOT try to change the
> structure of a message if user did not asked this explicitly. For example,
> what should happen if one writes a mixed chinese-japanese-russian-norwegian
> text? In which each paragraph and each sentence contains quotes from all
> those languages (e.g. a multilingual dictionary). Gnus in no way should try
> to divide that message into parts.

Why not? Seriously, I see nothing wrong with it. Please enlighten me as to
why it is so horribly bad. There's no single charset that includes Chinese,
Japanese, Russian, and Norwegian glyphs, is there? (I'm showing my
international charset ignorance here. My apologies.) Assuming the answer is
no, then how in the world could you possibly send the e-mail and have your
recipient be able to see the same glyphs that you see if you're not going to
make the e-mail multipart? (If the answer was yes, then of course there
should only be one charset. I'm not saying we should use more charsets than
is absolutely necessary.)

> All that Gnus should do is: maintain a list of coding system to charset
> transformations. And use that list to encode the text from Emacs buffer to
> the charset which can fit all symbols used in that buffer. For example, if
> i write a mixed russian-japanese text, gnus should use a japanese encoding
> in mime part, because the japanese encoding contains russian characters as
> well. In short, gnus should not use any `auto-magic', and should try to
> find a charset which contains all characters appearing in a buffer using a
> translation list. This is how SEMI does things.

I'm sorry. I think I might have had my terminology wrong in my previous
e-mail. Yes, of course, the number of parts and charsets used should be
minimized, and if there's one charset which encompasses all the
characters/glyphs/coding systems used in the buffer, then that's the charset
that should be used. But what if there is no single charset? What if you need
two or three charsets? Why should I have to know these things and be forced
to type "<part>" into my message buffer in order for Gnus to switch charsets?
I'm not saying that manual control over such things be removed (if someone
wants to type "<part>", more power to them), but I would like Gnus to take
care of some of these details for me.