A status on MIME and character sets
The basic MIME RFC, RFC
1341, was published in June 1992.
MIME is now available in a wide variety of products, including
gateways to some of the most popular PC LAN based E-mail systems.
A conversion to X.400/88 is also defined, but not widely deployed.
Problems still abound:
- Non-MIME readers tend to be annoyed at something that turns
their nice friendly lærerhøgskole into l=E6rerh=F8gskole
instead of bitstripping it to lfrerhxgskole or using the
national variant's encoding of l{rerh|gskole.
- Lots of MIME readers fail to do encoding/decoding properly when
trying to forward, reply to or print mail
- Few readers are by default configured for anything but ISO
8859-1
- Few readers implement the (rather ugly) standard for writing
charsets in the subject line (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?l=E6rerh=F8gskole?=)
- Nobody supports UNICODE.
Still, the fragment below shows something of what is possible with
software in common use today.
Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no
Last modified: Tue Nov 29 16:04:30 1994