From: Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>
Subject: Re: Latin 1 in non-MIME news postings?
Date: 03 Sep 1998 09:47:48 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <m3af4hywgb.fsf@windlord.Stanford.EDU> (raw)
In-Reply-To: Stainless Steel Rat's message of "03 Sep 1998 12:30:43 -0400"
Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net> writes:
> "RA" == Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:
> RA> News specifies article body format follows RFC 822, which specifies
> RA> 7bit ASCII. Technically, MIME isn't even legal in news.
> Wait.
> MIME in and of itself sits on top of RFC 822. MIME specifies that 8-bit
> data be encoded into a 7-bit format, usually base64.
> Recent incarnations of SMTP allow for 8-bit data over 8-bit clean
> networks between 8-bit clean MTAs, (ab)using aspects of MIME to
> accomplish this.
> Please do not confuse the two.
How am I confusing the two?
News specifies, by proxy, 7bit ASCII in article bodies. MIME, whether
7bit or 8bit or what have you, technically does not apply to news and
means nothing in news, since the news standards (although somewhat obscure
on this point) seem to indicate that they do not adopt 822 extensions.
Therefore there is technically no standards-compliant way to send 8bit
data of any sort, even ISO 8859-1 characters, across Usenet, even in an
encoded form, since news says that base64 is just a stream of characters
like any other 7bit ASCII body and that you cannot reliably apply any
particular interpretation to the headers that claim otherwise.
Obviously this is widely ignored in practice.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
next prev parent reply other threads:[~1998-09-03 16:47 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 12+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
1998-09-02 7:33 Kai Grossjohann
1998-09-02 9:49 ` Jost Krieger
1998-09-02 11:24 ` Kai Grossjohann
1998-09-03 10:15 ` Russ Allbery
[not found] ` <x7soi9yx8s.fsf@peorth.gweep.net>
1998-09-03 16:47 ` Russ Allbery [this message]
[not found] ` <x7k93lw2lm.fsf@peorth.gweep.net>
1998-09-03 17:22 ` Russ Allbery
1998-09-03 20:48 ` Richard Coleman
1998-09-03 17:35 ` Karl Kleinpaste
1998-09-03 10:27 ` Hrvoje Niksic
1998-09-02 10:42 ` jean-luc cassel
1998-09-02 12:25 ` Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen
1998-09-07 20:15 ` Kai Grossjohann
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