Re: Communicator Unicode

From: John Gardiner Myers (jgmyers@netscape.com)
Date: Wed Sep 24 1997 - 13:50:38 EDT


Alain LaBonti - SCT wrote:
> It seems to me that, even if it might appear heretic, one should assume, in
> absence of tags for headers, that the character set used is the same as the
> message body's.

Your use of the word "the" indicates that you're assuming there is
exactly one charset tag in the body to choose from. Such is not the
case.

The body might be a multipart/mixed or some other type which does not
have a charset. In the case of multipart/mixed, one might start parsing
the multipart/mixed in search of a charset tag on some part at a lower
level, but there might be more than one such tag and the tags might be
different.

Seems to me you're proposing violating an abstraction layer or two in
order to fish for information which in the general case cannot be
deterministically found. This is not good engineering.

> With GUI presentation of messages it would not be a major problem, as
> anyway the message is never displayed before full reception. For non GUIs,
> it would be just too bad, but certainly not worse than today. Right now,
> because of a dogma, it is wrong in all environments that do not cheat.

Right now, it is right in environments which use MIME encoded-words.



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