On Wed, 6 Oct 1999, Tomas Fasth wrote:
> So, you want to keep it simple. I also like it simple. Unfortunately
> the world wide reality is usually not quite that simple. When you
> mention non-ASCII as if it's something undesirable I cannot help
> associating to my native language, which happen to be Swedish.
Oh, sorry. My apologies. I shouldn't have used the word "ASCII". It's
too precise. What I meant was "plain unstructured text", and by that I
include 8-bit characters. You may have noticed that Exim is 8-bit clean.
That was a deliberate design decision precisely to help people whose
languages require more than the strict ASCII characters. Even English
occasionally needs an accent (mainly when it steals words from other
languages :-). 7-bit mail really *is* a dinosaur.
> In that regard, MIME is a good thing, not a bad one.
Stating what code the message is in is a good thing, sure. That's
entirely different to whether the message is plain text or further
encoded in some way.
> More over, the only viable long term
> replacement of ASCII is Unicode.
Since Exim is 8-bit clean, and we don't seem to be departing from the
use of 8-bit bytes, there is no problem here. Exim will pass your
Unicode message. All it needs is a header saying "this is in Unicode,
encoded as UTF-8" or whatever, and the MUA can deal with it.
> The Pine developers always have the choice of supporting HTML in a
> similar fashion as Lynx does.
Pine 4 does in fact do that.
> I general, I think the trend is to publish your documents on the net,
> and only sending hyperlinks to those it concerns.
Yes, yes! That is exactly what I would prefer people to do.
> Even dinosaurs have to adjust to a changing environment (the real
> ones never got the chance though 8)
I must have done fairly well. 30 years and still writing code that gets
used...
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
