Re: Revision of RFC 1494 - Teletex mapping?

Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no Wed, 11 January 1995 08:31 UTC

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From: Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no
To: Christian Huitema <Christian.Huitema@sophia.inria.fr>
cc: mime-mhs@surfnet.nl
Subject: Re: Revision of RFC 1494 - Teletex mapping?
In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 10 Jan 1995 15:08:40 MET." <199501101408.AA16010@mitsou.inria.fr>
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Date: Wed, 11 Jan 1995 09:20:59 +0100
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Christian,
I heartily agree that translations are evil; the only thing more evil
is lack of communication :-)

The problem with Teletex (and one reason why I don't like it) is that
it is NOT text/plain, but a sequence of OCTET STRINGS representing
pages, with non-text announcers telling us what kind of paper it
expects to be printed on and so on, which means that we *have* to get
into the business of changing the encoding no matter what we do.

Teletex was designed for a negotiated interchange medium, and has
been shoehorned into the message transfer world without losing any
of its troublesome aspects, just like G3Fax.

The reason I suggested GeneralText for the reverse mapping is that I do
NOT enjoy the scenario where one has to generate 3 different body part
types from a single MIME type; having IA5text and GeneralText both is
unavoidable, but I don't want to encourage the adoption of Teletex
in X.400/88 more than I have to.

(European functional profiles for X.400/84 require Teletex for ADMDs and the
non-standard "ISO 6937" body part for PRMDs; the fact that the two profiles
weren't able to agree on a single recommendation for extended characters
is one reason why I don't have much respect for that process. I HOPE to
be able to continue ignoring the "ISO6937" body part, but several people
who sell software have told me that Teletex is "THE standard" for sending
national characters in X.400/84)

                       Harald A