usefor-article-06 November 2001

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4.4.2.  Character Sets within Article Bodies

   Within article bodies, characters are represented as octets according
   to the encoding scheme implied by any Content-Transfer-Encoding and
   Content-Type headers [RFC 2045].  In the absence of such headers,
   reading agents cannot be relied upon to display correctly more than
   the US-ASCII characters.

        NOTE: Observe that reading agents are not forbidden to "guess",
        or to interpret as UTF-8 regardless, which would be the simplest
        course for them to take.

        NOTE: It is not expected that reading agents will necessarily be
        able to present characters in all possible character sets,
        although they MUST be able to present all US-ASCII characters.
        For example, a reading agent might be able to present only the
        ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1) characters [ISO 8859], in which case it
        Ought to present undisplayable characters using some distinctive
        glyph, or by exhibiting a suitable warning. Older reading agents
        that do not understand MIME headers or UTF-8 should be able to
        display bodies in US-ASCII (with some loss of human
        comprehensibility) except possibly when the Content-Transfer-
        Encoding is "8bit".

   Followup agents MUST be careful to apply appropriate encodings to the
   outbound followup. A followup to an article containing non-ASCII
   material is very likely to contain non-ASCII material itself.
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News Article Format and Transmission May 2004
News Article Format and Transmission November 2003
News Article Format June 2003
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News Article Format February 2003
News Article Format August 2002
News Article Format May 2002
News Article Format July 2001
News Article Format April 2001
News Article Format February 2000

--- ../usefor-article-05/Character_Sets_within_Article_Bodies.out          July 2001
+++ ../usefor-article-06/Character_Sets_within_Article_Bodies.out          November 2001


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