Re: a few short notes

On 2-feb-04, at 18:20, Martin Duerst wrote:

> At 14:52 04/02/02 +0100, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

>> The only conclusion that's obvious is that email is a global system 
>> so requiring capabilities we can't reasonably expect to be available 
>> globally (ie, the ability to manipulate non-latin characters) is not 
>> an option.

> If you use UTF-8, then the only ability you really need globally is
> the ability to manipulate streams of 8-bit bytes. Any problems with 
> that?

The problem isn't the encoding inside the computer, it's the user or 
administrator that must be able to do something reasonable with it. In 
this regard, UTF-8 encoding doesn't help much.