ietf-nntp NNTP and 16-bit charsets

Andrew Gierth andrew at erlenstar.demon.co.uk
Thu Apr 26 10:21:38 PDT 2001


>>>>> "Charles" == Charles Lindsey <chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:

 Charles> An article with its headers written in UTF-8, and with a
 Charles> Content-Type that specifies charset=some-16-bit-set. Yes,
 Charles> life would be simpler if it had used charset=utf-8, but
 Charles> 16-bit charsets are quite legitimate as MIME objects.

16-bit charsets in MIME still have to conform to the requirements of
the content-transfer-encoding used, which means that if the charset
does strange things with NUL or CR/LF octets, it can't be sent in 7bit
or 8bit but only in binary, QP or base64.

 Charles> Again, it might be better to have used
 Charles> Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 (and maybe that will have
 Charles> to be mandated somewhere), but suppose it is actually being
 Charles> sent with encoding 8bit,

Valid 8bit encodings are always safe to transport over NNTP, even with
existing implementations.

 Charles> or even binary.

but the "binary" content-transfer-encoding isn't supported by any
existing implementations, and as far as I can see there is no way to
fix that, because in the CRLF.CRLF terminating sequence, the first
CRLF is part of the article body.

-- 
Andrew.



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