INTERNET-DRAFT                               Charles H. Lindsey
Usenet Format Working Group                  University of Manchester
                                             July 2001

4.4.2. Character Sets within Article Bodies

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.

Diffs to previous draft

--- {draft-04}	Wed Jul 11 21:55:16 2001
+++ {draft-05}	Wed Jul 11 21:55:16 2001
@@ -1,6 +1,4 @@
 
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,
@@ -18,7 +16,7 @@
         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
+        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".