A challenge to the ASCII proponents.

[Martin v. Löwis]

Erik Max Francis <max at alcyone.com> writes:

> Yeah, but that only works if everyone's expecting the same encoding.  I
> just see garbage non-ASCII characters, for instance, with my lowly
> Netscape 4 newsreader.

No, that is not a prerequisite. Instead, the prerequisite is that the
news reader/MUA knows what MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail
Extensions) is. In the MIME header, I clearly identified the encoding
of this message as UTF-8, so any news reader *should* be capable of
converting this to the local encoding (perhaps using replacement
characters where glyphs are missing).

> Looked like it was probably was here, I saw what looked very strongly
> like eight double-byte characters (and two bytes each).

But then, you were able to read the English parts of my message just
fine, right? The ASCII letters in this message did not take up two
bytes per letter, as they would have if the message was encoded in
UTF-16.

Regards,
Martin