[Mimedefang] Re: Plug-in to transcode messages

[Philip Prindeville]

Kelson wrote:
> Philip Prindeville wrote:
>   
>> Which goes to my point about broken MUA's sending out
>> useless encodings other than the trinity of usascii/latin1/
>> utf8...
>>     
>
> Isn't ASCII redundant if you have Latin-1?
> Aren't ASCII and Latin-1 redundant if you have Unicode?
>
> Perhaps it would be more appropriate to transcode *all* mail into UTF8.
>   

The point is to use the smallest charset your message
will fit into.

That's part of the "be conservative in what you send"
philosophy that drives the Internet.

A pager or a cell-phone might not have full UTF-8 fonts.

You're going for the widest possible functionality with
the least requirements in terms of resources if you want
Internet protocols to be truly ubiquitous (which has long
been a design goal).

-Philip