Re: Gnus: UTF-8 and compatibility with other MUAs

[Xavier Maillard <zedek@gnu-rox.org>]

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Jesper Harder <harder@myrealbox.com> writes:

>  Xavier Maillard <zedek@gnu-rox.org> writes:
>  
> >  I know Emacs is able to use utf-8 encoding so Gnus is.
> >  
> >  My question is more a question of compliance with other MUAs.
> >  Would you recommend your users to use utf-8 as a default encoding
> >  system ?
>  
>  No, because there's no reason to use UTF-8 if a more widely supported
>  charset is sufficient.

Ok for that. So what would be the default charset to recommend to
people ? 

Why the hell was utf-8 invented so ?
  
>  To use UTF-8 by default would also be against RFC 2046:
>  
>  ,----[ RFC 2046, Section 4.1.2. ]
>  |
>  |    In general, composition software should always use the "lowest
>  |    common denominator" character set possible.  For example, if a
>  |    body contains only US-ASCII characters, it SHOULD be marked as
>  |    being in the US- ASCII character set, not ISO-8859-1, which,
>  |    like all the ISO-8859 family of character sets, is a superset of
>  |    US-ASCII.  More generally, if a widely-used character set is a
>  |    subset of another character set, and a body contains only
>  |    characters in the widely-used subset, it should be labelled as
>  |    being in that subset.  This will increase the chances that the
>  |    recipient will be able to view the resulting entity correctly.
>  `----  
>  But if the message contains characters (or combination of characters)
>  where a _single_ iso-8859-x charset can't be used, then by all means
>  use UTF-8.  This is far better than sending a multipart message
>  (which Gnus does if UTF-8 isn't available).

Thanx for the hint.

zeDek
-- 
"Just did it."

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