Explaining Open Standards email attachements [summary what to send?]

Theo Schmidt theo.schmidt at wilhelmtux.ch
Wed Apr 7 08:16:21 UTC 2010


franz schaefer schrieb:
>>    TXT is not a good idea because then the question of character set arises.
 >
> for most uses (where formating is not important) txt inside the body of the
> email is the best option. 

Inside an email is OK as long as you don't need to process the text further 
(line breaks) or can live with broken special characters like in the German 
language, which happens when the sender and the recipient use incompatible 
character sets.


> makes it easy to quote etc... character set is
> also not much of a problem today since the character set is described in the
> MIME header and most programms can deal with all of the character sets.
> although UTF-8 encoding should be preferred today..

As soon as everbody uses UTF-8 I guess this problem will be solved. However 
there are still lots of installations using older character sets. Even in 
German-speaking countries there is an incompatibilty thanks to the Euro sign. 
ISO-8859-15 includes this but is incompatible with ISO-8859-1. And I guess 
Asians or Americans will have other sets.

If the text in TXT is not within an email, one should specify the character set 
and the computer plattform (because of the different linebreak characters used 
by Lin/Win/Mac). This is too complicated for most people, so TXT is not a good 
"foolproof" interchange format, although I expect it is a good archive format, 
especially if restricted to the ASCI character set.

Cheers, Theo



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