At 18:20 -0600 3/19/2002, dman wrote:
>See again the "Content-Transfer-Encoding" stuff Phil's been telling
>you about. The Norwegian (or whatever) 8-bit characters are converted
>to a sequence of 7-bit characters. Then they are sent over the wire
>to the other server. Then the recipient converts the sequence of
>7-bit characters back to 8-bit characters. Then the recipient decides
>what glyph to put on your screen accoring to the charset specified in
>the Content-Type: header.
Just like any sane person would have designed an e-mail system. ;-)
[In the beginning, there were *lots* of mail handling machines which dealt
with 7 bits only, so it's not as insane as it seems.]
In 20 years or so (will it be 10?) we'll (I may not be part of that "we"
any longer by then) at the period ca. 2002 and wondering why Unicode wasn't
*the* way of passing mail around.
John (email: punched cards or paper tape, box, stamps ;-) )
--
John Baxter jwblist@??? Port Ludlow, WA, USA
