Subject: Re: state of mime compliance

From: Jacob Morrison <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 1997 22:30:42 +0800

Simon,

On Wed, 23 Apr 1997, Simon Yeh wrote:

> I wonder what is current state of MIME-compliance of Chinese capable
> MUA (mail user agent), both commercial and freeware? Such as what
> character sets, parameters (hints?), are supported. Can user customize
> these settings?

There is a Chinese version of pine, which is a solid UA for Unix, DOS,
and OS/2. I have seen a few localized Chinese Windows UAs, but they were
not all that full featured. MIME UAs generally have configurable character
set for messages going out, though most people have it set for ISO-8859-1
:-( I think the Chinese version of Netscape has menus in Chinese.

My company (Control Data) has localized our Windows UA for Chinese
(simplified and traditional), Korean and Japanese. I think it is
quite nice ;-)

>
> Has any product support or plan to support those encoding schemes
> (iso-2022-cn, iso-2022-cn-ext, cn-gb, cn-big5, cn-gb12345, cn-gb-isoir165)
> proposed by rfc1922?

There are two approaches: entering the data natively or converting the
data for transmission.

If your OS natively supports a particular encoding, you just enter the
data and give it the proper tag. Examples are cn-gb and cn-big5. MULE
(Multilingual EMACS) can work with ISO-2022-cn, and EMACS has a mail
interface, so I guess that counts.

>
> And, more curiously, what are the realities, instead of just a claim?
>

I am not sure that encodings other than cn-gb and cn-big5 (and
maybe ISO-2022-CN for interfacing with X.400) are really useful.
For average use in closed systems, this is just fine. For interchange,
I think Unicode is a better choice.

Having said that, I am planning to add support for them as in our
mail server system. I am already adding support for conversions between
GB 2312, Big5, CNS 11643, Unicode and ISO-2022-CN; adding additional
character set conversions is not a big deal.

I might add it to our UA as well, if there is a demand. The Japanese
version of Eudora already does this for ISO-2022-JP.

> --- Simon Yeh

Regards,
Jake