Christopher Jahn wrote:
> And it came to pass that Holger Metzger wrote:
>> Let's look at Xnews, a reader that supposedly displays
>> plaintext "as is". It doesn't have a clue about
>> MIME-encoding. It sends out messages not caring about what
>> kind of characters the body contains. People using Xnews
>> don't know (because on their Windows PC with windows-1252
>> the message displays fine) that as soon as they are using
>> characters that are not part of us-ascii (for example � as
>> in fianc�e), other readers (IMO all Unix readers) that look
>> at the header first might be *very* confused about how to
>> display the body.
>>
>>
>
> But this is true of ANY mail/news client. Which is why
> "special" characters are to be avoided inemailand news messages.
All other newsreaders I know encode MIME properly. Netscape, Outlook
Express (with a little help), tin, slrn, knews, MacSoup, gnus.
Xnews doesn't = unusable.
You can't force people not to use "extended" characters. What about
German? French? East-european languages? US-ASCII is only the beginning.
Most western-european languages therefore use iso-8859-1.
You might not use them, but maybe you reply to a person using them, and
then you have a problem, well not you, but a person with a serious
newsreader trying to make something out of characters in the body of
your posting that havem't been declared properly.
BTW, a simple static X-Header in Xnews would solve the problem:
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Holger
--
Leela: "Just relax, Bender. Tomorrow we'll pry you down, have a nice
breakfast, and then go hunt down and slaughter that ancient evil."
Fry: "It'll be a rich full day."
Netscape 6 FAQ deutsch: http://www.hmetzger.de
