usefor-article-10 April 2003

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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, though they MUST display at least those.

        NOTE: The use of non-ASCII characters in the absence of an
        appropriate Content-Type-header is not compliant with this
        standard, even though such usage has been seen in some
        hierarchies (with no indication of which character set has been
        used beyond the user's ability to guess based upon other clues
        in the article, or custom within the newsgroup).

        NOTE: It is not expected that reading agents will necessarily be
        able to present characters in all possible character sets. 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.

   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
News Article Format February 2003
News Article Format August 2002
News Article Format May 2002
News Article Format November 2001
News Article Format July 2001
News Article Format April 2001
News Article Format February 2000

--- ../usefor-article-09/Character_Sets_within_Article_Bodies.out          February 2003
+++ ../usefor-article-10/Character_Sets_within_Article_Bodies.out          April 2003
@@ -8,12 +8,10 @@
 
         NOTE: The use of non-ASCII characters in the absence of an
         appropriate Content-Type-header is not compliant with this
-        standard. Nevertheless such usage has been seen in some
-        hierarchies, and it would be reasonable for reading agents to
-        make an informed "guess" when confronted with that situation,
-        and in particular it would be wise at least to test whether they
-        were in the form of valid UTF-8 (see also the suggestion for
-        such a test in 4.4.1).
+        standard, even though such usage has been seen in some
+        hierarchies (with no indication of which character set has been
+        used beyond the user's ability to guess based upon other clues
+        in the article, or custom within the newsgroup).
 
         NOTE: It is not expected that reading agents will necessarily be
         able to present characters in all possible character sets. For


Documents were processed to this format by Forrest J. Cavalier III