ietf-nntp NNTP and 16-bit charsets

Charles Lindsey chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk
Fri Apr 27 04:12:35 PDT 2001


In <87d79zmva5.fsf at erlenstar.demon.co.uk> Andrew Gierth <andrew at erlenstar.demon.co.uk> writes:


>>>>>> "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.

Yes, but "strange things" needs to be defined clearly. Here is FOOCRLF in
UCS-2.

0x0046004f004f000d000a

which, if you look as it with sufficient prejudice would appear to contain
5 NULs, a naked CR and a naked LF. If we were to permit NULs in NNTP (do
we?) then there might be a slim hope of making a transformation system
work. But I agree we are likely to go the other way.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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