> On Wed, 12 Jul 2000, Frank da Cruz wrote:
>
> > Perhaps you're suggesting the Unix 'mail' should become a translation
> > agent between the character set of the mail and that of the user's
> > terminal? I hope not, since given that practically any character set
> > anybody can dream up is "MIME-compliant" as long as it's tagged, then
> > every mail program must know how to convert from every character set in
> > existence to every other one.
>
> Yes, it damn well should. And this is easy, as there is a standard Unix
> function that knows how to do this. (it's called iconv).
>
I'm logged into unix right now:
$ iconv
bash: iconv: command not found
$
How standard can it be? And what about VMS, VMS/CMS, VOS, OS/390, OS/400,
Tandem, and all the others?
How does the mail client know what character set my terminal has?
Anyway, between you and me, there are potentially lots of places where
character-set conversion can occur. Your mail client, your MTA, my MTA,
my mail client, my Telnet server, my Telnet client, my terminal emulator.
Let's think carefully about this before we have random combinations of
these clients, agents, and servers stepping on each others' toes.
- Frank
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:05 EDT