Re: Revision of RFC 1494 - Teletex mapping?

["Carl S. Gutekunst" <[e-mail]>]

>In fact the irony of the pure approach is that in practice is is often the
>minimalist, purest-of-the-pure implementations that do the most damage....
>in so doing they often fail to deal with boundary conditions properly.

Dunno how many times I've seen someone assume that because their string
manipulation code was "clean" for ISO 8859.1 that they could safely shovel
around T.61 or Shift JIS....  It's correct often enough that it usually gets
past Q.A. and doesn't blow up until a customer tries it.  :-(  Even X.400 MTA
vendors trip over this, e.g., string lengths that are defined in terms of T.61
characters but calculated in bytes.

>.... but we offer the option to convert to iso-8859-1 or any of the 200-odd
>other character sets we support if you really want to.

Two *hundred* ??  Lawsy, lawsy.

Our most demanded body types for X.400 are IA5, ISO 6937, and T.61, perhaps
because we sell a lot to Canada.  The Canadian PTTs seem to implement 6937,
and not T.61.

>>charset=iso-6937 has another advantage: no "dot" in the name! :-)
>
>? I don't know why this is an issue -- dots are allowed in content-type
>parameter values without quoting.

Oops.  I even have that yellow-highlighted in my copy of RFC-1521.  Now I
have to double check the standards before making facetious comments?  ;-) ;-)

<csg>