[Info-vax] Open Source on OpenVMS - A Progress Report

[MetaEd]

On Oct 19, 7:59 am, Jan-Erik wrote:
> There is absolutely nothing
> saying that this newsgroup or any other group should be
> only supporting characters that happens to be in the
> *english* alphabet or that it must be 7-bit plain ASCII.

Actually, there is, RFC 1036. This controls the message format for all
messages posted to newsgroups. The message format must follow RFC 822
with some minor modifications. RFC 822 is limited to ASCII (7-bit
codes).

Any message composed with characters that cannot be represented with
ASCII codes must be stripped of those characters or encoded somehow to
ASCII before transmission. The de facto standard for encoding text is
RFC 2045--2049 (MIME).

As of this writing, Google Groups does not use MIME when all the
characters of the message can be represented with ASCII codes.

Otherwise, if the message can be represented with Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1)
codes, Google Groups does so, and encodes with MIME using Quoted-
Printable. Because Latin-1 is an ASCII superset, and because Quoted-
Printable preserves most ASCII codes, this causes ASCII to be used to
encode the message for transmission wherever possible. Other
characters are encoded with a hex notation. Long lines are also
preserved using a line continuation code. So, despite being encoded,
these messages are pretty easy to comprehend using a newsreader that
lacks MIME support.

But if the message cannot be represented with Latin-1 codes, Google
Groups uses UTF-8 codes, and encodes with MIME using Base64. UTF-8 and
Base64 are too different from ASCII for such messages to be
comprehended easily using a newsreader that lacks MIME support.

The attribution line which Google Groups creates in the body (for
example: "On Oct 20, 2:06 pm, MetaEd <met... at gmail.com> wrote")
contains a Latin-1 non-breaking space (code A0) between the minutes
and the "am" or "pm". This is a character which does not exist in
ASCII.

As a courtesy to readers having no MIME support, posters can replace
the non-breaking space with a plain space. This will avoid MIME
encoding, as long as the message has no other non-ASCII characters.

And, as a courtesy to posters who are spelling names and places
properly using non-ASCII codes, readers can learn to read MIME encoded
messages or use a newsreader that has MIME support.

I do not know if someone is maintaining a FAQ where this information
belongs.

Best wishes,

Edward